The Last Protest | Page 4

in the path of the redskins, and in the traditions of the range it is told that this is not good for steers. The tough little cow-pony came around on his hind legs to face the Indians.
One man sat quietly in the middle of the trail with his right hand raised and empty, but the score that came over the ridge swerved to one side and stopped before they came to the one. Collins wondered curiously where the Indians had procured the whisky, for to him it was very evident that they were happily drunk. Young Moon he recognized easily; he had won a lame pony from him at the big poker game after the round-up last fall. But at the poker game Young Moon was attired in a cheap black suit of store clothes instead of a bonnet of feathers and a gaudy apron.
Young Moon rode up to within easy-speaking distance and dismounted. Collins gathered himself up firmly in the saddle.
"How," greeted the Indian.
"How," returned the cow-boy.
"You better go 'way," said Young Moon, with a decisive sweep of the arm.
"Go 'way h -- -," replied Collins, laconically. "What yuh driving at, anyhow?"
"We going down the creek," said Young Moon. "You and your people go away -- back to where you come from."
"Oh, so that's the game, eh?" said Collins, cheerily. "Well, yuh'd better not do anything rough, ol' pigeon-toe, or they'll have a slue of those stiff-necks from Fort Custer down here an' shoot yuh good an' plenty."
Young Moon laughed. The poor mortal "stiff-necks" attempting to contend with the Great Spirit -- truly it was amusing. Eloquently and with many gestures he hastened to inform Collins that before long the Indian would pitch his tepee on the parade-ground at the fort. The regime of the white man was at an end in the land; Young Moon, he whom the spirits had rendered invulnerable, said it.
Collins would have laughed gleefully if Young Moon attired in the ordinary raiment of civilization had given utterance to such fanciful language. But here was Young Moon, more than half naked, entirely sober, and with a score of bucks at his back, calmly saying that the white man was to be driven out of the valley. It was evident that Young Moon and his bucks were not on a drunk, but on the war-path. This sort of thing, Collins felt, was distinctly out of place now. Such things had passed into the school-history stage.
"Old man, lemme tell yuh something," he said confidingly, leaning over the saddle pommel. "Yuh're trying to run your bluff away too late. Don't yuh go for to buck the brass-buttons now; they're too strong for yuh. Yuh jest mosey 'long back to yer reserve an' act decent. Sabe? I'm only a-telling yuh for yer own good."
Again Young Moon laughed scornfully.
"We go down there. Sabe?" he said positively, pointing down the trail behind Collins. Then the flash of savage rage, the wild, blinding desire to slay, came to him, and he whipped the well-worn short-barreled Winchester from beneath his blanket and fired from the hip point-blank into the herd. Collins's six-shooter came out and up with a jerk. He was no longer the suave diplomat and benevolent Indian adviser; this Indian was killing the cattle under his charge.
"Hol' on there, yuh -- -- -- -- -- low-lived -- -- -, yuh!" he called fiercely. "Don't yuh try any more o' that funny work, or I'll let -- -- -into yuh so quick yuh'll never know what hit yuh. Yuh can go to Fort Custer, or yuh can go to -- -- , if yuh want to; but I tell yuh right here, if yuh ever get past here, it'll be after yuh an' me an' a whole lot of yer friends have cashed in. Sabe?"
Young Moon understood fully. The cow-puncher was mad. Mad cow-punchers with big blue six-shooters in their hands are not objects to fuss lightly with. Young Moon hesitated.
For a moment the two faced each other silently, the Indian and the cow-puncher, the gaudy, picturesque savage and the commonplace utilitarian, the old and the new. Both had much to think of in that moment. Young Moon tried hard to conceive some manner in which he could get a good shot at Collins without danger to himself.
Collins was thinking of the property under his charge, the herd running wildly back and forth in the trail below, and the new home of Peterson the "newcomer," which lay farther down the 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