Those, too, Tsistsaki had ready for us. Abbott and I rammed the charges in; Tsistsaki inserted a fresh fuse. We wheeled the gun round into place, and my uncle again sighted it and touched it off. We waited and waited, and at last saw a cloud of dust and bits of sagebrush puff into the air close to the left of the fleeing enemy. As one man they leaped affrightedly to the right and headed for the mouth of a coulee that entered the valley from the west. Before we could load the cannon again they had turned up into the coulee and were gone from our sight. "Well," my uncle exclaimed, "I guess that settles our trouble with that outfit!" Almost at the same moment a heated argument arose among our engagés, every one of whom asserted that he had killed an enemy. "Here, you, the way for you all to settle your claims is to go out there and show which one of the enemy you each downed!" Not one of them made answer to that; not one of them wanted to go out there, perhaps to face a wounded and desperate man. Pitamakan stared at them, muttered something about cowardly dog-faces, and leaped over the barricade. Abbott, my uncle, Tsistsaki, and I followed his move, but we had gone out some distance before the engagés began to follow, moving slowly well in our rear. We, of course, did not proceed without due caution. The very first one of the dead that we approached was one of the two Crows who had tried to entice Pitamakan and me into a peace smoke with them, which would have been our last. We were glad enough that he was one of the dead. "I killed him," said Pitamakan as we passed on. "I killed him; he dropped when I fired, but I cannot count coup upon him." "Why not?" Tsistsaki asked. "Because of that!" he replied, turning and pointing to the engagés. They had come to the body of the Crow and three were pretending to have fired the bullet that laid the enemy low. "I cannot prove that I killed him," he added sorrowfully. Now the three engagés who had been left on guard in the grove came to us, out of breath and excited, and my uncle promptly ordered them back to their places. We made the round of the dead, the engagés taking their weapons and various belongings; then we went back to the barricade for dinner, first, however, watering and picketing the hungry horses. Later on, when the teams were again hitched, the engagés drove about and gathered up the dead and consigned them to the depths of the big river.