It was a strange procession, and in that tragic gloom the boy’s light-hearted words were balm to me.

Silently and slowly we moved forward.  The underbrush was thick on either side of the narrow, stony way that wound between sheer cliffs.  We had torn up our blankets and shirts to muffle the horses’ feet, that no sound of hoofs, striking upon the rocky path, might reach the ears of the Cheyenne and his allies crouching watchfully above us.  At the head marched Captain Jenness and Scout Pliley, each with his carbine for a crutch and leaning on each other for support.  Followed five soldiers as front guard through the defile.  And then four horses, led by careful hands, bearing nine suffering, silent men upon their backs.  Two of the horses carried three, and one bore two, and the last horse, one—­a dying boy, whispering into my ear a message for his mother, as I held his hand.  Behind us came the sergeants with the remainder, for rear-guard.  And so we passed, mile after mile, winding in and out, to find some sheltering spot where, sinking in exhaustion, we might sleep.

The midnight winds grew chill, and the tense strain of that slow march was maddening, but not a groan came from the wounded men.  The vanguards of the plains knew how to take perilous trails and hold their peace.

When the sun rose on the second day the hills about us swarmed with savages, whose demoniac yells rent the air.  Leonidas had his back against a rock at old Thermopylae, but our Kansas plainsmen fought in a ring of fire.

At day-dawn, our brave scout, Pliley, slipped away, and, after long hours among the barren hills, he found the main command.

Men never gave up hope in the plains warfare, but each of us had saved one bullet for himself, if we must lose this game.  The time for that last bullet had almost come when the sight of cavalrymen on a distant ridge told us that our scout was on its way to us again.  It took a hero’s heart to thread unseen the dangerous trails and find our comrades with the cavalry major and bring back aid, but Pliley did it for us—­a man’s part.  May the sod rest lightly where he sleeps to-day.

Meantime, on the day before, the main force of our cavalry, who had given us up for lost, had had their own long, fearful struggle.  In the early morning, Lieutenant Stahl, scouting forward in an open plain, rushed back to give warning of Indians everywhere.  And they were everywhere—­a thousand strong against a feeble hundred caught in their midst.  They rode like centaurs, and their aim was deadly true as they poured down, a murderous avalanche, from every hillslope.  Their ponies’ tails, sweeping the ground, lengthened by long horse-hair braids, with sticks thrust through at intervals by way of ornament; their waving blankets, and streamered lances held aloft; the savage roar from ten hundred throats; the mad impetus of their furious charge through clouds of dust and rifle smoke—­all made the valley of the Prairie Dog seem but a seething hell bursting with fiendins shouts, shot through with quivering arrows, shattered by bullets, rocked with the thunderous beat of horses’ hoofs, trampling it into one great maelstrom of blood and dirt.