So hot was the Indian fire that every one of the three Battleford men was shot as soon as he reached the top of the bank. One of them got a second bullet in him while Acheson was carrying him back, and they rolled over together. Acheson was picking the man up again, when a Métis scrambled up out of the gully and levelled his musket at the rescuer’s back. Lloyd fired his last cartridge and knocked over the Métis, whose body carried down with it half a dozen Indians climbing up behind him. A moment after, a bullet pierced Lloyd’s side, took off a piece of a vertebra, and stretched him helpless on the turf. Acheson, all his ammunition gone, sprang to Lloyd’s defence, and stood over him with clubbed rifle; but neither of them would have lived another minute if a handful of their comrades had not come up in the nick of time and driven back their assailants.
It is that same Lloyd, now Bishop of Saskatchewan, whose name is immortalized by the town of Lloydminster. Acheson is a bishop too, in Connecticut.
Desperately grave as the situation was, it had its moments of humor. A bullet scraped the skin off Sergeant McKell’s temple. “Another good Irishman gone!” he cried as he fell—but picked himself up next minute on discovering that he was not killed at all.
“What on earth have you been wearing that red tuque for?” a rifleman asked when he met one of the Battleford men at the end of the fight,—“I heard there was a halfbreed with a red tuque on, and I’ve been firing at you all the morning.”
The guns were the grimmest joke of all. The gatling sprayed the prairie with a vast quantity of lead, and a machine gun is all very well when your enemy stands in front of it in a crowd; but that is not the Indians’ way. They had a wholesome respect for the seven-pounders—which was more than the gunners themselves had, for the wooden trails were rotten and gave way under the recoil, so that one of the guns fell to the ground after every shot and the other had to be tied to its carriage with a rope.
At last our men were allowed to charge down the slopes and clear out the gullies. The Indians fled before them, and prepared to defend their camp. But we were not allowed to follow up our advantage. Instead, the order was given to retire. The teams were hitched up in a hurry, and the retreat began. We had lost eight killed and fourteen wounded.