"Let them show outside, then," thundered Keyser, "or it's too late. If that gun goes before I can tell my men--" He broke off and rushed to the entrance. There were skirmishers deploying from three points, and Crook was raising his hand slowly. There was a pistol in it. "General! General!" Keyser shouted, waving both hands, "No!" Behind him came E-egante, with Sarah, talking in low tones, and Fur Cap came too. [Illustration: "HE HESITATED TO KILL THE WOMAN"] The General saw, and did not give the signal. The sight of the skirmishers hastened E-egante's mind. He spoke in a loud voice, and at once his warriors began to emerge from the willows obediently. Crook's bluff was succeeding. The Indians in waiting after nine were attempting a little bluff of their own; but the unprecedented visit of nine men appeared to them so dauntless that all notion of resistance left them. They were sure Gray Fox had a large army. And they came, and kept coming, and the place became full of them. The troopers had all they could do to form an escort and keep up the delusion, but by degrees order began, and the column was forming. Riding along the edge of the willows came E-egante, gay in his blankets, and saying, "How! how!" to Keyser, the only man at all near him. The pony ambled, and sidled, paused, trotted a little, and Keyser was beginning to wonder, when all at once a woman in a green shawl sprang from the thicket, leaped behind the chief, and the pony flashed by and away, round the curve. Keyser had lifted his carbine, but forbore; for he hesitated to kill the woman. Once more the two appeared, diminutive and scurrying, the green shawl bright against the hill-side they climbed. Sarah had been willing to take her chances of death with her hero, and now she vanished with him among his mountains, returning to her kind, and leaving her wedded white man and half-breeds forever. "I don't feel so mad as I ought," said Specimen Jones. Crook laughed to Glynn about it. "We've got a big balance of 'em," he said, "if we can get 'em all to Boise. They'll probably roast me in the East." And they did. Hearing how forty took three hundred, but let one escape (and a few more on the march home), the superannuated cattle of the War Department sat sipping their drink at the club in Washington, and explained to each other how they would have done it. And so the General's bluff partly failed. E-egante kept his freedom, "all along o' thet yere pizen squaw," as Mr. Long judiciously remarked. It was not until many years after that the chief's destiny overtook him; and concerning that, things both curious and sad could be told.[A] [Footnote A: Let me no longer pervert General Crook's military tactics. It was a dismounted charge that he ordered on this occasion, as a friend who was present has written me since the first publication of this story. _Mr. Remington's illustration was made to suit the text in its original form._--Publisher's Note.] SALVATION GAP