The Prairie Detective — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

6 THE PRAIRIE DETECTIVE. The greater part of them were men who smiled at danger, and scorned the peril to which they were frequently exposed, for peril there was, on every hand. The Indians, naturally enough, perhaps, were in- clined to resent this wholesale intrusion on what they considered their domains, and wherever there was an opportunity to slaughter their white enemies they took advantage of it with an eagerness which established their intentions, if it did not add to their reputation for humane acts and thoughts. But this was not the worst form of danger which existed. The country was full of renegade white men, who sometimes lived with the Indians, and aided them in open warfare against the whites, and sometimes acted clear of either faction, committing depredations on each, and existing as a kind of guer- illa force, to harass and rob everybody they could find who had anything worth stealing. Some of them ran in couples, some in numbers of three or four. There was one regularly organized band. It was the terror of the country. For months, sometimes, ‘‘The Bloodsuckers” would not be heard from, and people would begin to hope that they had been drawn away to some other section by promises of richer spoils. But just as this hope would almost seem to have become a certainty, the band of assassins and rob- bers would turn up in some entirely unexpected quar- ter, and perform terrible feats of blood. They seemed to have no settled field of labor, and, in fact, never committed two crimes consecutively in the same region. Their plan was as simple as it was fearful. One night they would make a sudden descent Eomicbooks.com } dashes ye Ai eat ’ a! 7