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Wherefore, when those hopeful five hundred
savages charged, the fourteen hunters tore into them blithely with
their big
buffalo
guns, and began emptying redskin saddles at a most disheartening rate.
The
Indians charged fiercely three times, and the unerring
Mr. Masterson and his friends
corded up over twenty of them. The siege, before all was over, lasted
two weeks; but the fighting, so far as the
Indians were concerned, after those first three furious charges --
which broke the aboriginal teeth -- was but half-hearted and
desultory.
To tell the whole of the battle at the
'Dobe
Walls would go beyond the limits of an article such as this. The
excited comments of a tame crow which, while the fight raged, flew
chatteringly to and fro from Hanrahan's to Wright's and back again;
would of themselves make a story; while how
Mr. Masterson crossed to Wright's
store in quest of cartridges for a pet rifle he possessed, and was
deeply bombarded in transit by a wounded
Kiowa
hiding in a clump of weeds; how a boy in Wright's died from a bullet
in his lungs; how Old Man Richards walked through a hail of lead to a
pump ten rods away in the open, and, while a dog was killed at his
feet, and his hat shot from his gray head, and bullets plowed and
spattered the pump platform and ground about him, drew a bucket of
cool water for the dying boy; how a wild tenderfoot, one Thompson --
killed afterward by
Billy the
Kid -- persisted, in the teeth of command and the very face of
slaughter, in rushing forth to rob dead
Indians of their war bonnets and guns; how the lookout on
Hanrahan's roof blew out his own brains instead of an
Indian's; how Mr. Masterson, in
the plenitude of his young conceit, leaped from a window and scalped a
Comanche
-- he owned an unusually alluring top-knot, black and glossy-under the
very noses of his scandalized tribesmen; how each night the
beleaguered ones, to save their own noses, must bury the dead
Indians and ponies; how throughout the long two weeks, when not at
the windows fighting, the said beleaguered ones beguiled the tedium of
their lives by profound games of draw poker; how the
Comanche
medicine man was luckily killed by Mr.
Masterson on the first charge; how that same faultless rifle shot
afterward brought down a negro bugler, who had deserted the standards
of Uncle Sam for those of the
Cheyennes,
and was then sounding charge and rally as war music cheering to the
aboriginal heart; and how finally, after two weeks, the cavalry came
down from
Dodge and raised the siege, must one and all, as battle elements,
wait for their relation upon occasion more comprehensive than this.
Suffice it that the
Indians were beaten, with a whole battle-loss -- by their own
story told later at the agencies -- of over eighty killed, to the
meager count of one slain by savage lead on the side of the
buffalo hunters.
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