Trail and Trading Post; or, The Young Hunters of the OhioStratemeyer, Edward
General
Trail and Trading Post; or, The Young Hunters of the Ohio
Stratemeyer, Edward
Frontier and pioneer life -- Juvenile fiction
“Halt!” whispered Sam Barringford, presently. “I see an Injun!” And he
pointed out the red warrior two hundred feet or more below them.
The Indian was watching the trail below, and soon he was joined by ten
or a dozen others. The Indians were totally unconscious of the fact that
some white men were looking down upon them, and their eyes were fixed
steadfastly upon the trail below, watching for the first appearance of
the Morris expedition.
“What a trap!” murmured Henry. “Had we been caught in it, nothing could
have saved us.”
“Right you are, Henry,” said another of the party. “Sam deserves a good
deal of credit for saving us.”
To give the others of the expedition time to get as far as possible from
the scene of action, it was decided to wait awhile before beginning an
attack on the Indians. The latter waited patiently for over an hour,
when they began to show some uneasiness, thinking their plot had
miscarried.
“Now we’ll show ’em a trick or two,” said Sam Barringford, and gave the
order to advance.
The Indians were taken completely by surprise, and at the first fire of
the English three fell, one dead and the others mortally wounded. One
other was struck in the thigh and rolled down the hill on to the trail
below.
“Give it to ’em again!” roared Sam Barringford. “Give it to ’em, the
sons o’ Satan!” And he fired a second time, while some of the others did
the same. Another Indian went down, and then the rest fled, in several
directions. The whites went after them, and in the end fully half of the
band under Eagle Nose were exterminated. Eagle Nose himself was struck
in the left forearm, and withdrew with the rest of his warriors, vowing
bitter vengeance.
Of the whites, strange to state, not one was injured, although the red
men fired arrows and shots at them many times. One arrow went through
the hunting shirt of one of the frontiersmen, and a bullet clipped the
cap of another, and that was all. The Indians fled to the northward, and
that was the last seen of them for a long while to come. Some were very
bitter against Eagle Nose for leading them into a trap, as they
expressed it, and there was some talk of deposing the chief, but nothing
came of this.
“Sam, you saved us from utter annihilation,” said Joseph Morris, when
the two parts of the expedition had been once more united. “I thank you
from the bottom of my heart,” and he gave the old frontiersman’s hand a
tight squeeze.
“I wish I had been in that fight,” said Dave to Henry. “It must have
been exciting.”
“It was, but not as much so as some of the fights we had during the
war,” answered his cousin. “We had the Indians on the run from the very
start.”
No time was now lost in moving forward, it being Joseph Morris’s wish to
leave the Indians as far behind as possible. They traveled until late at
night, when they reached a safe shelter among the rocks and trees. It
was now cloudy once more, and soon after they went into camp it began to
snow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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