The Last Protest | Page 5

valley, the first of the
houses in the path of Young Moon and his followers. Collins suddenly
remembered that there was a young wife in the home of the newcomer;
also a little red-cheeked, yellow-haired baby, who had played in the
dooryard when he passed there in the morning on his search for the
strays.
"I suppose these rowdies 'u'd scare -- -- -out o' that little woman if they
ever get that far," he thought. "They might even -- No; they'll never get
a chance for that; I'm here to see they don't get -- "
"Here, yuh!" It was Collins who cried out. Young Moon was
deliberately throwing the empty shell out of his rifle. "Hol' on the -- "
The words were cut short in Collins's mouth. Action, swift, sure,
terrible, had taken their place. Young Moon was down on his face in
the bunch-grass, and dust and a tiny thread of blue smoke wreathed
upward from Collins's pistol. A dozen shoulders hunched into shooting
position and a dozen black rifle-barrels focused on Collins. But Young
Moon began to rise to his feet slowly, hesitatingly, as a drunken man
rises. His bonnet was off, the feathers were awry, the hot, stale dust was
thick upon a face gray with terror, and a look of awful, unutterable
surprise was in his small black eyes. He stretched his arms outward --
the gesture of a chief commanding quiet, peace.
"You see now that I am the Great Spirit," he said boastfully. "The white
man's bullet slays the flesh, but the spirit still lives." He stood up
straight and virile in the sunlight and shouted, "I cannot die!"
Deliberately he turned to take aim at Collins.
No quick snap-shot this time. Young Moon fell prone on his face, his
limbs out-stretched in the rigidity which tells unquestionably of death,
sudden and violent.
His followers waited silently and expectantly for him to rise, and
Collins deliberately turned his back on the band and rode down the
trail.

"Oh, Young Moon! Arise, arise, Young Moon!" called the bucks.
The wind that waved the prairie-grass stirred slightly some of the
war-feathers; otherwise there was no motion.
"Speak! Oh, speak, Great Spirit!" they cried as they rode up to him. But
the spirit failed to respond.
"So, so he is dead," said one who dismounted and turned him on his
back.
The band glanced as one man down the valley, where Collins was
driving the herd before him at a gallop. It seemed an easy matter to
overtake him, but -- Young Moon, their wonderful medicine-man, the
invulnerable, was dead.
His brother, with the aid of another, silently placed the body securely
on a pony, and the band silently followed as the pony turned his nose
north toward the reservation.
"Uh, so only Young Moon is dead?" queried the old men sneeringly
when they saw the laden pony.
The young men said naught, but with hanging heads accepted the
sneers due them as stoically as the old men had received the taunts of a
few nights ago. The old squaw had the body brought to her tepee, for
his kin would not own him, and a breed-dog sat outside and howled
long and loud in the night. Otherwise the camp would have slept quite
peacefully.
Collins, as he rode past Peterson's with the herd, saw the woman
holding the yellow-haired baby by the hands, while the little one,
gurgling with laughter, tottered around in a somewhat uncertain circle.
"Hallo, Meester Cohlenss!" called the woman, cheerily. "Ai see you got
t'ose cows oll right."
"Oh, yes," said Collins; "yes, I got the cows all right."

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