"They overtook him, so Satanta told Dave, just after the man had killed a buffalo, skinned part of the hide back, an', as the Injuns supposed, was about to cut out some o' the hump steak; an', just as we made it out by the signs, the man, seeing the desperate fix he was in, had cut his horse's throat to make a breastwork of his carcass on one side, an', with the buffalo on the other, had got down between 'em an' give the Injuns a rattlin' good fight, killin' one Kiowa, badly woundin' another, an' killin' the two ponies you found the bones of. "But they got him at last--at least he killed himself when he was down to his last cartridge--an' then they piled onto him an' stripped every stitch of clothes off his body, but, seein' that the man had committed suicide, their superstitions kept 'em from scalping him or mutilating his body. "An', now comes a gratifying part of the proceedings, as told to Dave by Satanta, that the signs didn't reveal to us. When Lame Deer an' his party had stripped the dead man an' his horse of all their equipments an' was gittin' ready to return to Satanta's party at the hunters' camp, some of the Injuns concluded to cut out a big chunk of the hump steak of the buffalo that the white man had just stripped the hide off of an' intended to cut out the steak himself, as they s'posed. "But it turned out that the white man had unconsciously set a death-trap for some of 'em; for he had already poisoned the skinned side of the buffalo, and when the Injuns got back to the camp an' cooked an' eat their fresh hump steak all that eat the fresh meat was poisoned, an' four of 'em kicked the bucket right there. "Well, sir, Dave says, this so scared the rest of the Injuns that, although they had packed their ponies with a lot of the white men's provender, they were afraid to use any of the food, an' so they piled all of it into the white men's wagon an' set fire to it an' burned the whole business. "Then, packing the bodies of their dead warriors on their ponies, they made their way back to their main village, some miles down the creek, a little the loser in the long run, for, although they had killed the three white men an' destroyed their outfit, it had cost 'em five warriors. "The wiping out of these wolf hunters," Tom went on, "corroborates what I've often told you, an' what your own experience ought to teach you, that it's never safe to depend on the friendship of Injuns--'specially Kiowas. Whenever they can get a good chance at a white man, or a small party of whites, they don't hesitate to murder 'em--an' 'specially a party of hunters, for that class they consider their natural enemies on account of the hunters killing what the Injuns claim to be the red man's game.