“That’s the very copper cuss with yellow trimmings who had me down when that arrow stopped me,” Beverly exclaimed.  “He was seven feet tall and streaked with yellow just that way.  I thought ten million rattlesnakes and eight billion polecats had hit me.  His club was awful.  Then I caught sight of old Gail’s face in the dust-storm, coming back to help me.  He gave the Indian one dose and got one back, a good hard bill, and then the dust closed in and Gail was off again to the northwest out there, like a hurricane.  I could hear him a mile away.  Couldn’t I Gail?  Where is Gail?”

Where?

“Oh, back there with the stock!”

No?

“Out there looking over the draw for things that’s got all scattered.”

No?  Not there?

“Oh, he’s getting breakfast.  And we are all hungry enough to eat raw Kiowas now.”

No?  No?

“Gail would be helping the wounded, anyhow, or straightening out dead men’s limbs.  Poor fellows—­to lose six!  It’s awful!”

No?  No?  No?

“Bathing in the river?  Where?  Over there across the sand-bar?”

Nowhere!  Nowhere!

“By the eternal God, they’ve got him!” Jondo’s agonized voice rang through the camp.

“We can take care of the wounded, and those fellows lying over there don’t need us.  But, oh, Gail!  They’ll torture him to death!” Rex Krane’s voice choked and he ground his teeth.

“Gail, my Gail!” Beverly sat down white and desparingly calm—­Beverly, whose up-bubbling spirits nobody could repress.

The others wrung their hands and cursed and groaned aloud.  Only Bill Banney, the unimaginative and stern-hearted, stood motionless with set jaws and black-frowning brows.  Bill, whom the plains had made hard and unfeeling.

“We won’t give up Gail, will we, Bill?” Jondo spoke sternly, but his face—­they said his face was bright with courage and that his eyes shone with the inspiration of his will.  In all that crowd of eager, faithful men, he turned now to Bill Banney.  Every man had his place on the plains, and Jondo out of the chrism of his own life-struggle knew that Bill was bearing a cross in silence, and that his was the martyr spirit that finds salvation only in deeds.  Bill was the man for the place.

And so while straying animals were slowly recovered, while the camp was set in order, while the dead were laid with simple reverence in un-coffined graves, and the sick were crudely ministered to, while Beverly grew feverish and his arrow wound became a festering sore, and Rex Krane, master of the company, cared for every thing and everybody with that big mother-heart of his—­Jondo and Bill Banney pushed alone across the desolate plains toward where the Smoky Hills wrapped in their dim gray-blue mist mark the low watershed that rims the western valley of the Kaw.

They went alone because skill, and not numbers, could save a captive from the hands of the Kiowas, and the sight of a force would mean death to the victim before he could be rescued.