While the Kiowas were playing their tricks upon the Apaches, the latter managed to a certain extent to turn the tables.

When they branched out upon their reconnoitering expedition, Waukko was engaged in the same business.

When he discovered the single sentinel sitting by the fire, he crept up like a phantom behind him, and drove his hunting knife with such swift silence that his victim gave only a spasmodic quiver and start, and was dead.
Waukko placed him in the position he was occupying at the time he first caught sight of him, and then left his companions to learn the truth for themselves, while he crept back to learn that his prisoner had given his captor the slip.
Fred Munson was terrified when he found he was standing by the dead form of his friend Thompson, a couple of nights before, and so, in the present instance, a certain awe came over him, as it naturally does when a person stands in the presence of death.

But, for all that, the boy was heartily glad, and he had wisdom enough to improve the splendid opportunity that thus came to him, and for which he had hardly dared to pray.
"I don't see what a dead man can want of a gun," he muttered, as he moved rather timidly toward the figure, "and, therefore, it will not be thieving for me to take it." There was a little involuntary shuddering when he grasped the barrel and sought to draw the weapon from its resting-place.

The inanimate warrior seemed to clutch it, as though unwilling to let it go, and the feeling that he was struggling with a dead man was anything but comfortable.
Fred persevered, however, and speedily had the satisfaction of feeling that the rifle was in his possession.
The weapon was heavy for one of his size, but it was a thousand times preferable to nothing.
He stood "hefting" it, as the expression goes, and turning it over in his hand, when he heard the report of a second gun, this time so close that he started, thinking it had been aimed at him.
Such was not the case; but at that moment there came an overpowering conviction that he was doing a most foolhardy thing in remaining so conspicuously in view, when the red-skins were liable to return at any moment and wreak their vengeance upon him for the robbery, to say nothing of the death, of their comrade, which might be attributed to him.