MY FIRST BATTLE.
neck. The wound certainly looked as if it must be mortal, but the jugular vein was not touched and there was hope. I was dizzy and sometimes senseless. This perhaps was because the wound was so near the brain. I constantly thought I was on the mountain slope overlooking home, and kept telling the men to go and bring my mother. We had no surgeon, and the men tied up our wounds as best they could in tobacco saturated in saliva.
That night the Indian camp was plundered and burnt. The next morning, as the provisions were out, preparations were made to descend the mountain. I here must not forget the kind but half-savage atten tion of these rough men. They could do but little, it is true, but they were untiring in attention and sympathy. They held my head in their laps, and talked low and tenderly of early health and my re turn home. I saw one man crying, the tears dropping down into his long grizzly beard ; then I thought I should surely die. In the morning one kind but mistaken old fellow brought a leather bag, and held it up haughtily before my eyes in his left hand, while he tapped it gently with his bowie knife. The blood was oozing through the seams of the bag and trickling at his feet.
" Them s scalps."
I grew sick at the sight.
The wounded were carried on the backs of squaws that had been taken in the fight. A very old and wrinkled woman carried me on her back by setting
