Our foolishness was not without profit.  We walked, boldly about under our white flag, and learned how thoroughly our camp was beleaguered.  To the south of our train, not more than half a mile away, we made out a large Indian camp.  Beyond, on the meadow, we could see Indian boys riding hard on their horses.

Then there was the Indian position on the hill to the east.  We managed to climb a low hill so as to look into this position.  Jed and I spent half an hour trying to count them, and concluded, with much guessing, that there must be at least a couple of hundred.  Also, we saw white men with them and doing a great deal of talking.

North-east of our train, not more than four hundred yards from it, we discovered a large camp of whites behind a low rise of ground.  And beyond we could see fifty or sixty saddle-horses grazing.  And a mile or so away, to the north, we saw a tiny cloud of dust approaching.  Jed and I waited until we saw a single man, riding fast, gallop into the camp of the whites.

When we got back into the corral the first thing that happened to me was a smack from mother for having stayed away so long; but father praised Jed and me when we gave our report.

“Watch for an attack now maybe, Captain,” Aaron Cochrane said to father.  “That man the boys seen has rid in for a purpose.  The whites are holding the Indians till they get orders from higher up.  Maybe that man brung the orders one way or the other.  They ain’t sparing horseflesh, that’s one thing sure.”

Half an hour after our return Laban attempted a scout under a white flag.  But he had not gone twenty feet outside the circle when the Indians opened fire on him and sent him back on the run.

Just before sundown I was in the rifle pit holding the baby, while mother was spreading the blankets for a bed.  There were so many of us that we were packed and jammed.  So little room was there that many of the women the night before had sat up and slept with their heads bowed on their knees.  Right alongside of me, so near that when he tossed his arms about he struck me on the shoulder, Silas Dunlap was dying.  He had been shot in the head in the first attack, and all the second day was out of his head and raving and singing doggerel.  One of his songs, that he sang over and over, until it made mother frantic nervous, was: 

   “Said the first little devil to the second little devil,
   ‘Give me some tobaccy from your old tobaccy box.’ 
   Said the second little devil to the first little devil,
   ’Stick close to your money and close to your rocks,
   An’ you’ll always have tobaccy in your old tobaccy box.’”