The Blood tribe knew how Bad-Young-Man, known to the whites as
Charcoal, had three weeks before come home from a hunting trip to his
little cabin where his wife, the Marmot, lived. He had found his wife
in the arms of Medicine-Pipe-Stem, and by his warrior’s right to defend
his own honor, had shot the intruder down. Charcoal had done justice,
and the tribe was ready to take his part, whatever the agent might say
or the Mounted Police might do for the white man’s law.
A week had passed of close inquiry, when one of the scouts rode up
to the ration house, where the people were drawing their supplies of
beef, and gave warning that Charcoal was betrayed to the Mounted
Police. Charcoal demanded the name of his betrayer, and learned that
Mr. Wilson, the agent, was his enemy. That evening Charcoal waited
outside the agent’s house, watching the lighted windows, where, on the
yellow blinds there were passing shadows cast by the lamp within, as
various members of the household went about their business. At last he
saw Mr. Wilson’s shadow on the blind, fired and shot the agent through
the thigh. The household covered the lamps, closed the shutters, sent
for help and hid the wounded man on a couch behind the front door,
well out of range from the windows. Next morning, in broad daylight,
Charcoal went up to the house with a rifle to finish Wilson, walked in
and looked about him, but failed to discover his victim behind the open
door. He turned away and rode for the hills. The Mounted Police, turned
out for the pursuit, were misled by a hundred rumors.
D Troop at the time numbered one hundred seventy men, the pick of
the regiment, including some of the greatest riders and teamsters in
North America, and led by Colonel S. B. Steele, the most distinguished
of all Canadian frontiersmen. After he had posted men to guard all
passes through the Rocky Mountains, he had a district about ninety
miles square combed over incessantly by strong patrols, so that
Charcoal’s escape seemed nearly impossible. The district however, was
one of foothills, bush, winding gorges, tracts of boulders, and to the
eastward prairie, where the whole Blood and Piegan tribes were using
every subtlety of Indian craft to hide the fugitive.
Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts, had been seventy
hours in the saddle, and camped at Big Bend exhausted, when a rider
came flying in reporting Charcoal as seen at Kootenai. The white men
rallied for the twenty-eight-mile march, but the Indians lay, and were
kicked, done for, refusing to move. The white men scrambled to their
saddles, and reeled off on the trail, unconquerable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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