“You speak as one expecting a promotion, Bev,” I suggested.

“I’d know how to use it if I got it,” he smiled brightly at me as we quickened our pace not to fall behind.

Every day of that campaign Beverly grew dearer to me.  I am glad our lives ran on together for so many years.

The canons deepened and the whole region was bewildering, but still we struggled on, lost men searching for lost men.  The sun blazed hotly, and the soft yellow bluffs of bone-dry earth reached down to the dry beds of one-time streams.

High noon, and still no food, no water, and no lost men discovered.  We had pushed out to a little opening, ridged in on either side by high, brown bluffs, when a whoop came from the head of the line.

“Yonder they are!  Yonder they are!”

Half a dozen men, led by Captain Jenness, were riding swiftly to join us and we shouted in our joy.  For some among us that was the last joyous shout.  At that moment a yell from savage throats filled the air, and the thunder of hoofs shook the ground.  Over the west ridge, half a mile away, five hundred Indians came swooping like a hurricane down upon us.  And we numbered, altogether, twenty-nine.  I can see that charge to-day:  the blinding, yellow sky, the ridge melting into a cloud of tawny dust, the surge of ponies with their riders bending low above them; fronting them, our little group of cavalrymen formed into a hollow square, on foot, about our mounts; the Indians riding, in a wide circle around us, with blankets flapping, and streamer-decked lances waving high.  And as I see, I hear again that wild, unearthly shriek and taunting yell and fiendish laughter.  From every point the riflle-balls poured in upon us, while out of buffalo wallow and from behind each prairie-dog hillock a surge of arrows from unmounted Indians swept up against us.  I had been on battle-fields before, but this was a circle out of hell set ’round us there.  And every man of of knew, as we sent back ball for ball, what capture here would mean for us before the merciful hand of death would seal our eyes.

Suddenly, as we moved forward, the frantic circle halted and a hundred braves came dashing in a fierce charge upon us.  Their leader, mounted on a great, white horse, rode daringly ahead, calling his men to follow him, and taunting us with cowardice.  He spoke good English, and his voice rang clear and strong above the din of that strange struggle.  Straight on he came, without once looking back, a revolver in each hand, firing as he rode.  A volley from our carbines made his fellows stagger, then waver, break, and run.  Not so the rider of the splendid white horse, who dared us to strike him down as he dashed full at us.

“Come on, you coward Clarenden boys, and I’ll fight you both.  I’ve waited all these years to do it.  I dare you.  Oh, I dare you!”

It was Charlie Bent.