The Last Protest | Page 5

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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