A vast dizziness and a throbbing of the head remained after they were quite done with me, but something of this left me when finally I sat leaning back against the wagon body and looked about me.  There were straight, motionless figures lying under the blankets in the shade, and under other blankets were men who writhed and moaned.  Belknap passed about the place, graver and apparently years older than at the beginning of this, his first experience in the field.  He put out burial parties at once.  A few of the Sioux, including the one on whom Andrew Jackson McGovern had vented his new-found spleen, were covered scantily where they lay.  Our own dead were removed to the edge of the bluff; and so more headstones, simple and rude, went to line the great pathway into the West.

Again Ellen Meriwether came and sat by me.  She had now removed the gray traveling gown, for reasons which I could guess, and her costume might have been taken from a collector’s chest rather than a woman’s wardrobe.  All at once we seemed, all of us, to be blending with these surroundings, becoming savage as these other savages.  It might almost have been a savage woman who came to me.

Her skirt was short; made of white tanned antelope leather.  Above it fell the ragged edges of a native tunic or shirt of yellow buck, ornamented with elk teeth, embroidered in stained quills.  Her feet still wore a white woman’s shoes, although the short skirt was enforced by native leggins, beaded and becylindered in metals so that she tinkled as the walked.  Her hair, now becoming yellower and more sunburned at the ends, was piled under her felt hat, and the modishness of long cylindrical curls was quite forgot.  The brown of her cheeks, already strongly sunburned, showed in strange contrast to the snowy white of her neck, now exposed by the low neck aperture of the Indian tunic.  Her gloves, still fairly fresh, she wore tucked through her belt, army fashion.  I could see the red heart still, embroidered on the cuff!

She came and sat down beside me on the ground, I say, and spoke to me.  I could not help reflecting how she was reverting, becoming savage.  I thought this—­but in my heart I knew she was not savage as myself.

“How are you coming on?” she said.  “You sit up nicely—­”

“Yes, and can stand, or walk, or ride,” I added.

Her brown eyes were turned full on me.  In the sunlight I could see the dark specks in their depths.  I could see every shade of tan on her face.

“You are not to be foolish,” she said.

“You stand all this nobly,” I commented presently.

“Ah, you men—­I love you, you men!” She said it suddenly and with perfect sincerity.  “I love you all—­you are so strong, so full of the desire to live, to win.  It is wonderful, wonderful!  Just look at those poor boys there—­some of them are dying, almost, but they won’t whimper.  It is wonderful.”

“It is the Plains,” I said.  “They have simply learned how little a thing is life.”