The Ferguson Rifle Read Online Free PDF

life.
    Degory Kemble moved over to us. “There’s nobody in sight,” he said. “My guess is they’ve pulled out.” He saw the Indian lying in the dust and moved over to him. With his toe he turned him over, holding his rifle ready for a shot if the warrior proved to be playing possum.
    He was quite dead. One side of his head was bloody, crushed by my blow. I turned away, and looked out over the prairie.
    â€œYou want his hair?” Davy asked. “He’s yours.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s a barbaric custom.”
    â€œThis here is a barbaric land. You get yourself a few scalps and the Injuns will respect you more.”
    â€œTake it if you wish.”
    â€œNo. By rights it’s yours.”
    Kemble carefully broke the dead warrior’s arrows, then his bow. His knife he tossed to me and that I kept. “Trade it for something,” Kemble said. “It’s worth a good beaver pelt.”
    â€œI thought I shot one,” I said. “He came in right over there.”
    â€œThey’re like prairie dogs,” Talley commented. “If you don’t kill them right dead, they’re gone into some hole.”
    We walked over to where I’d seen the Indian, and suddenly Talley pointed. “Hit him, all right. See yonder?”
    There was a spot of blood, very red, splashed upon a leaf. Just beyond we found two more.
    We followed no farther for the trail of blood vanished into thick brush, and he might be lying down there, waiting for us.
    â€œLung shot, I’d say,” Kemble said. “You nailed him proper.” He looked at me. “For a pilgrim, you sure take hold. That’s as good shootin’ as a man can do.”
    â€œI didn’t want to kill him,” I said. Then I paused. That was not quite true, because I certainly had not wanted him to kill me, and it was one or the other.
    â€œIf you’d not shot him, he’d have thought you a coward or a poor warrior. He’d despise you for it. You better think this through because there ain’t no two ways about it. You got to be ready to shoot to kill or you better go back home.”
    He was right, of course, and had not men always fought? We walked back to the fire where coffee was on. Bob Sandy came in. He had gone stalking and found nothing.
    â€œThey pulled out,” he said regretfully. “They’re no fools. The Otoe probably figured with a tenderfoot on watch it would be easy.” He grinned at me. “You fooled ’em, you surely did.”
    â€œI was fortunate,” I said, “and scared.”
    â€œYou bet you was,” Sandy said, “an’ you better stay scared. Time comes you stop bein’ scared, you better go back east, because you won’t last long after.”
    We sat around the fire and ate, and looking around at their faces, I thought of Homer and the Greeks camped on the shore waiting to advance on Troy.
    These were men of the same kind, men of action, fighting men, no better and no worse than those.

CHAPTER 4
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    N OTHING ANYONE CAN say can tell you how it was upon that land of grass. Horizon to horizon, upon every side, it stretched to infinity, and overhead the enormous vault of the sky.
    We plodded westward, and the land unrolled before us. More and more, as we moved away from the settlements, there was wild game, the buffalo in increasing numbers, and antelope often in herds of sixty or seventy.
    At streams where we stopped for water, we often found the tracks of bear, occasionally of lion. Wolves and the small prairie wolf called the coyote lurked in the vicinity of the buffalo, watching for a chance to pick off a calf or one too old to put up much of a fight.
    We rode warily, for there was no security even upon the open plains, because such openness was only seeming and not a reality. My boyhood became important, for then my eye had developed a quickness that became useful once more, and I