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.

His First Gun Trouble

Once, so runs the tale, a gentleman of extensive pistol practice was testifying as a witness. "How many men have you killed?" asked the cross-examining lawyer:

The witness seemed for the moment posed, almost puzzled. At last, as one seeking exact light, he enquired: