But trouble never stuck to “Mr. Bev,” because he failed to know it when it came.

Mid-August found us at Fort Hays on the Smoky Hill, beyond whose protecting guns the wilderness ruled.  A wilderness checkered by faint trails of lawless feet, a wilderness set with bloody claws and poison stings and cruel fangs, and slow, agonizing death.  And with all a wilderness of weird, fascinating distances and danger, charm and beauty.  The thrill of the explorer of new lands possessed us as we looked far into the heart of it.  Here in these August days the Cheyenne and Arapahoe and Kiowa bands were riding trails blood-stained by victims dragged from lonely homesteads, and butchered, here and there, to make an Indian holiday.  The scenes along the valleys of the Sappa and the Beaver and the Prairie Dog creeks were far too brutal and revolting to belong to modern life.  Against these our Eighteenth Kansas, with a small body of United States cavalry, struck northward from Fort Hays.  We rested through the long, hot days and marched by night.  The moon was growing toward the full, and in its clear, white splendor the prairies lay revealed for miles about us.  Our command was small and meagerly equipped, and we were moving on to meet a foe of overwhelming numbers.  Men took strange odds with Fate upon the plains.

Beyond the open, level lands lay a rugged region hemming in the valley of the Prairie Dog Creek.  Here picturesque cliffs and deep, earth-walled canons split the hills, affording easy ambush for a regiment of red men.  And here, in a triangle of a few miles area, a new Thermopylae, with no Leonidas but Kansas plainsmen, was staged through two long August days and nights.  One hundred and fifty of us against fifteen hundred fighting braves.

In the early morning of a long, hot August day, we came to an open plain beyond the Prairie Dog Creek.  Our supply-wagons and pack-mules were separated from us somewhere among the bluffs.  We had had no food since the night before, and our canteens were empty—­all on account of the blundering mismanagement of the United States officer who cammanded us.  I was only a private, and a private’s business is not to question, but to obey.  And that major over us, cashiered for cowardice later, was not a Kansas man.  Thank heaven for that!

A score of us, including my cousin and myself, under a sergeant, and with good Scout Pliley, were suddenly ordered back among the hills.

“Where do we go, and why?” Beverly asked me as we rode along.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “But Captain Jenness and a file of men were lost out here somewhere last night.  And Indian tracks step over one another all around here.  I guess we are out to find what’s lost, maybe.  It isn’t a twenty minutes’ job, I know that.”

“And all our canteens empty, too!  Why cut off all visible means of support in a time like this?  Look at these bluffs and hiding-places, will you!  A handful of Indians could scoop our whole body up and pitch us into the Prairie Dog Creek, and not be missed from a set in a war-dance,” Beverly insisted.  “Keep it strictly in the Clarenden family, Gail, but our honorable commander is a fool and a coward, if he is a United States major.”