Well, I had three skulking thieves of Indians dodging after me,
over better than four hundred miles of lonesome country, where I might
have bawled for help for a whole week on end, and never made anybody
hear me. They wanted my scalp, and they wanted my rifle, and they got
both at last, at the end of their man-hunt, because I couldn't get any
sleep."
"Not get any sleep. Why not?"
"Because they was three, and I was only one, to be sure! One of them
kep' watch while the other two slept. I hadn't nobody to keep watch for
me; and my life depended on my eyes being open night and day. I took a
dog's snooze once, and was woke out of it by an arrow in my face. I
kep' on a long time after that, before I give out; but at last I got
the horrors, and thought the prairie was all a-fire, and run from it. I
don't know how long I run on in that mad state; I only know that the
horrors turned out to be the saving of my life. I missed my own trail,
and struck into another, which was a trail of friendly Indians--people
I'd traded with, you know. And I came up with 'em somehow, near enough
for the stragglers of their hunting party to hear me skreek when my
scalp was took. Now you know as much about it as I do; I can't tell you
no more, except that I woke up like, in an Indian wigwam, with a crop
of cool leaves on my head, instead of a crop of hair.
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