Chapter XXV: A Heroic Effort

If Buffalo Bill had been given time, or had possessed the inclination, to take note of those priests, he would at least have been interested. Their faces were unnaturally red, with a coating of red paint, their clothing, such as they wore, glittered with gold ornaments, on their arms were shining gold armlets, and on their heads crowns of painted plumes.

The girl opened her eyes when she felt herself caught up from the sacrificial stone, and then, seeing that she was in the arms of a white man, she screamed.

Wild yells came from the doorway, which was filling with Indians, yet the priests fell back before the fiery, defiant eyes of the scout.

With the girl in his arms, he moved toward the door. The venture was so desperate that he did not know how it would terminate. To take stock of the chances against him was to court weakness.

“Stand back!” he said, speaking in English.

Though their knives were drawn, the startled priests fell back before him. They were muttering and crying out. The very daring of the thing was telling in his favor. They were shocked by the sacrilegiousness of this singular attempt to rescue from the sacrificial stone a being who had been devoted to the gods. No doubt they expected that the angry gods would strike down this intruder.

Yet the thing which really was working most in the scout’s favor was that these priests had never seen a white man before, and, until her capture, they had never seen a white woman. They had heard of them, as half-mythical creatures, and there were in the village men who claimed to have seen them, and to have penetrated to a land where white men swarmed like ants. Yet these priests had never until this minute looked into the face of a white man. Hidden away in that cuplike valley, ringed in by mountains, far in an unknown land, they had remained Aztecs in everything, even as their forefathers were.

Buffalo Bill guessed something of this, when he saw the terror and wonder working in the faces of the priests.

“Stand back!” he shouted, for he trusted they would understand the tone, if not the words.

But when he tried to pass out through that shining door he was pressed upon by Indians who were determined to resist this, by Indians who were not willing to have the temple invaded and the victim taken from the stone of sacrifice and from under the very knives of the sacred priests.

Buffalo Bill whipped out his revolver.

The girl had fainted, fortunately, and lay as if dead in his arms.

“Stand back!” cried the scout, and he swung the revolver round.

But there was a rush, as those in front tried to seize him, while a very frenzy of clamorous sound arose.

Then the scout’s revolver spoke, its report booming like thunder within those temple walls. The man who had sought to stop him uttered a cry of pain and bewilderment, and fell backward, his arm broken and dropping helpless at his side.

The effect of that revolver shot was unexpected even by the scout.

Wild cries of fright rose within the doorway and beyond it, where the packed Indians struggled now to gain the open air, and the men close by the scout, stunned apparently by the concussion of that revolver explosion, threw themselves face downward on the temple floor.

The way was open. At a bound the daring scout cleared it, reaching the outer steps of the temple. As he did this, the girl struggled in his arms, unconscious that she was hampering him.

The scout held her on his strong left arm, and clutched with his right hand his revolver.

Before him was a mass of Indians falling back out of his way. Behind him in the temple he heard voices wailing. Nearer at hand were those prostrate figures that had dropped to the temple floor when the revolver roared its defiant message.

The scout was looking beyond the crowd toward the trees where he expected to behold his friends in waiting, and was surprised that he did not see them there. He ran down the steps, for delays were dangerous, determined to fight his way through the compacted mass of Indians.

In this moment, when it seemed the path was hopelessly blocked, he recalled how a single soldier of Cortez, pitted against the Aztecs of his own day, had been equal to hundreds of them.

“Stand back!” he commanded again, as he passed down the temple steps.

The Indians near him tried to fall back, but those behind prevented them, and the result was a wild jumble and scramble of crowding Indians, that filled up every avenue of escape.

At this juncture, there was a wild American yell, the packed Indians in front of the scout were thrown apart, and through the opening thus made came Lieutenant Butler and Tom Lawler, with Bounderby and the German at their heels. It was something like a football wedge splitting open an opposing eleven.

The four white men had broken the line there by force of the surprise more than by the mere battering strength with which they had hit it. But the line closed instantly behind them and seemed to become more tightly packed than before.

They gained the side of the scout. Turning, with drawn revolvers, Lieutenant Butler and young Lawler placed themselves by him. Bounderby tried to line up with them, but Fritz Henselman made no such heroic effort. He had only come because he was afraid to stay, and he now ran behind Butler, and tried to crouch down. When he saw that Indians were coming from the other direction as well, his plight became pitiable.

The path of least resistance seemed to lie close along the temple wall now, and the scout and his daring comrades took it. But no sooner had they started along the wall than the Indians began to close in upon them, as if gaining courage.

“We shall have to fight our way through,” said Butler, flourishing his revolver. “Just give the word, Cody. We’ll have to down these fellows.”

“Fire a shot now and then, but do not shoot anybody unless you have to, and then shoot only to wound,” were the scout’s instructions. “We don’t want to enrage them. What we want to try to do is to scare them.”

He shot a bullet into the ground at his feet, and as it tore up the earth and the sound broke on their ears, the Indians fell back before him as if in amazement.

Seeing the effect, Lawler and Lieutenant Butler began to imitate him, with the same effect.

The Indians fell back, yet they did not vanish; they merely kept two or three yards away, as if they feared more than anything else the powder smoke and the earth that flew about when the bullets struck the ground.

“We’ll have to fight our way through,” said Lieutenant Butler, and Buffalo Bill was beginning to think this offered the only hope.

Then the unexpected happened.

A bag resembling a huge fishing seine dropped over them with a swishing sound, and instantly it so entangled them that they were helpless. It wrapped around their arms and their legs, enveloped their heads and necks, and closed about their heads and faces in smothering folds.

Buffalo Bill understood the nature of this trap at once, and he tried to draw his knife to cut his way through it, but the clinging net so held his hands that he could not quickly get out his knife. He stumbled and fell as he tried to walk, and the girl he had been carrying dropped to the ground. She tried to rise, but, her feet being caught in the net, she, too, was entangled.

Henselman was yelling for assistance like a madman, as he clawed and sputtered and tried to push back the folds of the strange thing that had fallen upon him.

The Indians were not idle. They swarmed forward as soon as they saw the white men caught in the clinging folds of the net, and throwing themselves boldly upon them, they held them down.

Hundreds of Indians were all around the net. Escape was impossible. The white men were trapped.

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