XII

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE PLAINS

Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether,
But we do not fall on the neck, nor kiss when we come together. 
—­“A SONG OF THE ENGLISH.”

The whole thing was clear now, clear as the big white day that suddenly beamed along the prairies, scattering the clouds into gray strands against the upper heavens.  The treachery of the Kiowas had been cleverly executed.  Word of their friendliness had come to us through the Mexican caravan which could have no object in deceiving us, since it was on its way to Kansas City to do business with the Clarenden house there.  And Jondo had sent a spy by night into the Kiowa camp as if they were not to be trusted.  Yet they had taken no offense; but, letting me keep my firearms, had led me into their council on the top of Pawnee Rock, where they had told me in clear English that they had nothing but love for the white brothers of the plains.  And to prove it we should pass unharmed along the trail where once we had wronged them by stealing their captive.  The prairies were wide enough for all of us and they had forgotten—­as an Indian always forgets—­all malice against us.  They had sent me back to camp with greetings to my captain, and had gone on their way to the heart of the Grand Prairie in the northeast.

It was only Jondo, as he rode wide of the trail for two days, who could see any mark of an Indian’s track.  And we had not believed Jondo.  We never made that mistake again:  But trust in his shrewdness now, however, would not bring back the oxen lost and the mules and ponies captured by the thieving band of Dog Indians.  But there was a greater loss than these.  The Kiowas had come for revenge.  It was blood, not plunder, they wanted.  A dozen men with arrow wounds reported at roll call, and six men lay stark dead under the pitiless sky.  Among them Davis of the St. Louis train, who had been too ill to take part in the struggle.  One more loss was there to report, but it was not discovered until later.

Indians seldom leave their dead on the field of battle, but the blood-stained sod beside their fallen ponies told a story of heavy toll.  Blood marked the trail of hoofprints to the northwest in their wild rout thither.  One comrade they had missed in their flight.  He lay down near the river where the ground had been threshed over by the stampeded stock.  He must have been a giant in life, for his was the longest grave made in the prairie sod that day.  At the river’s edge the sands were pricked with hoofprints, where the struggle to carry away the dead seemed to have reached clear into the thin yellow current of the Arkansas, although no trail led out on the far side of the stream.