the men had long guns and some hadn’t, and some
was riding and some was walking. And the weatherJ–
well, it was just roasting. And how slow they did
creep along! We swooped down now, all of a
sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their
heads.
The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat
on their stomachs, some begun to fire their guns at us,
and the rest broke and scampered every which way,
and so did the camels.
We see that we was making trouble, so we went up
again about a mile, to the cool weather, and watched
them from there. It took them an hour to get together
and form the procession again; then they started along,
but we could see by the glasses that they wasn’t pay-
ing much attention to anything but us. We poked
along, looking down at them with the glasses, and by
and by we see a big sand mound, and something like
people the other side of it, and there was something
like a man laying on top of the mound that raised his
head up every now and then, and seemed to be watch-
ing the caravan or us, we didn’t know which. As the
caravan got nearer, he sneaked down on the other side
and rushed to the other men and horses — for that is
what they was — and we see them mount in a hurry;
and next, here they come, like a house afire, some with
lances and some with long guns, and all of them yell-
ing the best they could.
They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the
next minute both sides crashed together and was all
mixed up, and there was such another popping of guns
as you never heard, and the air got so full of smoke
you could only catch glimpses of them struggling
together. There must ‘a’ been six hundred men in
that battle, and it was terrible to see. Then they
broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and
nail, and scurrying and scampering around, and laying
into each other like everything; and whenever the
smoke cleared a little you could see dead and wounded
people and camels scattered far and wide and all about,
and camels racing off in every direction.
At last the robbers see they couldn’t win, so their
chief sounded a signal, and all that was left of them
broke away and went scampering across the plain.
The last man to go snatched up a child and carried it
off in front of him on his horse, and a woman run
screaming and begging after him, and followed him
away off across the plain till she was separated a long
ways from her people; but it warn’t no use, and she
had to give it up, and we see her sink down on the
sand and cover her face with her hands. Then Tom
took the hellum, and started for that yahoo, and we
come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked
him out of the saddle, child and all; and he was jarred
considerable, but the child wasn’t hurt, but laid there
working its hands and legs in the air like a tumble-bug
that’s on its back and can’t turn over. The man went
staggering off to overtake his horse, and didn’t know
what had hit him, for we was three or four hundred
yards up in the air by this time.
We judged the woman would go and get the child
now; but she didn’t. We could see her, through the
glass, still setting there, with her head bowed down on
her knees; so of course she hadn’t seen the perform-
ance, and thought her child was clean gone with the
man. She was nearly a half a mile from her people,
so we thought we might go down to the child, which
was about a quarter of a mile beyond her, and snake
it to her before the caravan people could git to us to
do us any harm; and besides, we reckoned they had
enough business on their hands for one while, anyway,