262 THE RIFLE AND THE BOW. 



be fired to direct the hunter on his return, in case he 

 had lost his way. There was this additional cause to 

 be sedulous for Bayard's safety, in that, supposing the 

 Indians to have somehow or other got at the fact that 

 Bayard had slain Pawnee, the brother of Tehorson, 

 there was not a " brave" in the whole tribe of that chief, 

 the " Kiowas/' who would not gladly have risked his 

 life to have revenged the death of the petty chief, and 

 possessed himself of the scalp of the white warrior. We 

 were all well alive to this, and knew that, had the Indians 

 been aware of the position of things, we should to a cer 

 tainty have had " Setanka," the father-in-law of the late 

 Pawnee, and the war-chief of the Kiowas, upon our 

 camp with a demand, for the purchase of our own safety, 

 that Bayard should have been given up. Of course 

 this would have brought on a battle, and " a very pretty 

 quarrel " it would have been ! Immense odds in num 

 bers on the side of the redmen, but arms, ammunition, 

 and the best shooting all along with us. To assign to 

 the Indians the unerring aim with the rifle awarded by 

 novelists, is nonsense ; the savages dread the weapon, as 

 well as the better shooting of the white man, and take 

 very good care not to expose themselves on anything 

 like equal terms, in point of situation. At from twenty 

 to thirty yards their bows are a nastily-effective weapon, 

 for they shoot correctly and hard enough at that dis 

 tance to kill, and the wounds they make are difficult to 

 cure. The way the bow and arrow tells most efficiently is 

 by night, if there is cover enough to conceal the assailing 

 foe ; there being no flash and very little noise to direct 

 the rifle-fire in reply, it is of course difficult to quell 

 the unseen annoyance. On such occasions as these, how 



