The Sioux, unable to stand the attack, were falling back in confusion, with great loss, and the whites opened to permit them to pass through, while they closed in sullenly to cover the retreat. Sadly thinned in numbers, the band showed a gallant front still, and walked calmly back, pausing now and then to take a shot at the Blackfeet on the rocks, who showed themselves at times, shaking the scalps they had taken in the air, and waking the echoes with their shouts of triumph. “Look hyar; some one is going to git hurt if this goes on. You’d better let me loose,” Old Pegs said. “I’ll see you skulped first,” roared Jim Diggs. “Good-by, then,” replied Old Pegs, tauntingly, as he flung himself out of the saddle suddenly and sprung into a deep fissure which ran close beside the road. “I’m off!” “Shoot him, durn ye, shoot!” yelled Diggs, as he emptied his revolver into the fissure up which the old hunter was climbing, his form scarcely distinguishable. A volley rattled upward and Old Pegs who had reached a ledge at least twenty feet above them threw up his hands and fell upon the ledge out of sight. “Done fur!” said Jim, coolly. “He _would_ hev it, ye see. Jump up thar, Boston Jake, and lift his ha’r.” The man was about to obey, but at this moment the trappers burst in upon them and Boston Jake was forced to go with the rest, and in some haste, for the bullets of the trappers, “deadly aimed and hot,” rattled through the crowded ranks. The slow retreat turned almost to a rout, long before they reached the mouth of the ravine, but at this moment, wild eyed and savage, Rafe Norris broke a way through the ranks of his own men and reached the front. “Turn, curse you, turn!” he screamed, striking one of his own men a furious blow which brought him to the ground. “Turn, cowards and dogs! Never let it be said that you fled from such as these.” There was certainly personal magnetism about this man, for those who were to all outward seeming beaten beyond recall, turned at his slightest word and for a moment bore back the rushing tide of the trappers. But the Blackfeet, creeping from ledge to ledge, again reached a place from which they could rain destruction on the heads of their enemies, who were again forced to retire, but sullenly, contesting every foot of ground. “That cursed Blackfoot has ruined us, Jim,” groaned Rafe, looking up at the cliffs. “But for him they never could have broken through.” “The boys fought like devils, I tell ye,” said Jim Diggs. “Oh, I forgot to tell ye thet ‘Old Pegs’ tried to leg it and we had to pop him over.” “Let him go,” replied Rafe, quietly. “If it had been Dave Farrell I would have felt better, and yet the old man has done me wrong. Look out!”