The Dead Men's Tale

The swollen and blackened features of the dead men stared up, mutilated
as savages alone mark the fallen. Two were staked out, hand and foot,
and ashes lay near them, upon them. Arrows stood up between the ribs of
the dead men, driven through and down into the ground. A dozen mules, as
Jackson had said, drooped with low heads and hanging ears, arrow shafts
standing out of their paunches, waiting for death to end their agony.

"Finish them, Jackson."

Wingate handed the hunter his own revolver, signaling for Kelsey and
Hall to do the same. The methodical cracking of the hand arms began to
end the suffering of the animals.

They searched for scraps of clothing to cover the faces of the dead, the
bodies of some dead. They motioned the women and children back when the
head of the train came up. Jackson beckoned the leaders to the side of
one wagon, partially burned.

"Look," said he, pointing.

A long stick, once a whipstock, rose from the front of the wagon bed. It
had been sharpened and thrust under the wrist skin of a human hand--a
dried hand, not of a white man, but a red. A half-corroded bracelet of
copper still clung to the wrist.

"If I read signs right, that's why!" commented Bill Jackson.

"But how do you explain it?" queried Hall. "Why should they do that? And
how could they, in so close a fight?"

"They couldn't," said Jackson. "That hand's a day an' a half older than
these killings. Hit's Sam Woodhull's wagon. Well, the Pawnees like
enough counted 'coup on the man that swung that hand up for a sign, even
if hit wasn't one o' their own people."