Nine balls from Clarenden carbines flew at him.  Beverly and I were listed among the cleverest shots in Kansas, but not one ball brought harm to the daring outlaw.  A score of bullets sung about his insolent face, but his seemed a charmed life.  Right on he forged, over our men, and through the square to the Indian’s circle on the other side, his mocking laughter ringing as he rode.  A bloody scalp hung from his spear, and, turning ’round just out of range of our fire, shaking his trophy high, he shouted back: 

“We got all of the balance of your men.  We’ll get you yet.”

The sun glared fiercely on the bare, brown earth.  A burning thirst began to parch our lips.  We had had no food nor drink for more than twenty hours.  Our horses, wounded with many arrows, were harder to care for than our brave, stricken men.

Night came upon the canons of the Prairie Dog, and with the darkness the firing ceased.  Somewhere, not far away, there might be a wagon-train with food for us.  And somewhere near there might be a hundred men or more of our command trying to reach us.  But, whether the force and supplies were safe or the wagons were captured and all our comrades killed, as Charlie Bent had said, we could not know.  We only knew that we had no food; that one man, and all but four of our cavalry horses lay dead out in the valley; that two men in our midst were slowly dying, and a dozen others suffering from wounds of battle, among these our captain and Scout Pliley; that we were in a wild, strange land, with Indians perching, vulture-like, on every hill-top, waiting for dawn to come to seize their starving prey.

We heard an owl hoot here and there, and farther off an answering hoot; a coyote’s bark, a late bird’s note, another coyote, and a fainter hoot, all as night settled.  And we knew that owl and coyote and twilight song-bird were only imitations—­sentinel signals from point to point, where Indian videttes guarded every height, watching the trail with shadow-piercing eyes.

The glossy cottonwood leaves, in the faint night breeze, rippled like pattering rain-drops on dry roofs in summertime, and the thin, willow boughs swayed gently over us.  The full moon swept grandly up the heavens, pouring a flood of softened light over the valley of the Prairie Dog, whose steep bluffs were guarded by a host of blood-lusting savages, and whose canons locked in a handful of intrepid men.

If we could only slip out, undiscovered, in the dark we might find our command somewhere along the creek.  It was a perilous thing to undertake, but to stay there was more perilous.

“Say, Gail,” Beverly whispered, when we were in motion, “somebody said once, ‘There have been no great nations without processions,’ but this is the darndest procession I ever saw to help to make a nation great.  Hold on, comrade.  There!  Rest on my arm a bit.  It makes it softer.”

The last words to a wounded soldier for whom Bev’s grip eased the ride.