The warrior did not stir!  Could Indian sleep so sound?

Surely not, and the boy just then recalled the fate of the sentinel Thompson, a couple of nights before.

“I believe he is dead,” he muttered, looking attentively toward him, and feeling a speedy return of his courage.

With a lingering fear and doubt besetting him, he crept around the corner of the rock, taking one of the bones as he did so, and, when in position, he gave it such a toss that it dropped directly upon the head of the unconscious red man.

This was not a very prudent way of learning whether a man was sleeping temporially or eternally, when so much depended upon the decision of the question, for, if he were only taking a nap, he would be certain to resent the taking of any such liberties with his person.  The test, however, was effectual.  The bone struck his bead, and glanced as though it had fallen against the surface of a rock, and Fred could no longer doubt that the red-skin had been slain while sitting in this very attitude by the fire.

Such was the case.  There had been plotting and counterplotting.  While the Kiowas were playing their tricks upon the Apaches, the latter managed to a certain extent to turn the tables.  When they branched out upon their reconnoitering expedition, Waukko was engaged in the same business.  When he discovered the single sentinel sitting by the fire, he crept up like a phantom behind him, and drove his hunting knife with such swift silence that his victim gave only a spasmodic quiver and start, and was dead.

Waukko placed him in the position he was occupying at the time he first caught sight of him, and then left his companions to learn the truth for themselves, while he crept back to learn that his prisoner had given his captor the slip.

Fred Munson was terrified when he found he was standing by the dead form of his friend Thompson, a couple of nights before, and so, in the present instance, a certain awe came over him, as it naturally does when a person stands in the presence of death.  But, for all that, the boy was heartily glad, and he had wisdom enough to improve the splendid opportunity that thus came to him, and for which he had hardly dared to pray.

“I don’t see what a dead man can want of a gun,” he muttered, as he moved rather timidly toward the figure, “and, therefore, it will not be thieving for me to take it.”

There was a little involuntary shuddering when he grasped the barrel and sought to draw the weapon from its resting-place.  The inanimate warrior seemed to clutch it, as though unwilling to let it go, and the feeling that he was struggling with a dead man was anything but comfortable.  Fred persevered, however, and speedily had the satisfaction of feeling that the rifle was in his possession.

The weapon was heavy for one of his size, but it was a thousand times preferable to nothing.

He stood “hefting” it, as the expression goes, and turning it over in his hand, when he heard the report of a second gun, this time so close that he started, thinking it had been aimed at him.