“And that night, instead of Lieutenant Crane’s coming back, he sent word he had found the trail of a big band of Indians, and the whole crowd went in pursuit.  There was four companies of infantry, under Captain Rayner, and F and K troops,—­what was left of them,—­that were ordered to stay by the wagons and bring them safely down; and we started with them over towards Battle Butte, keeping south of the way the regiment had gone to follow Mr. Crane.  And the very next day Captain Rayner got orders to bring his battalion to the river and get on the boat, while the wagons kept on down the bank with us to guard them.  And Mr. Hayne was acting quartermaster, and he stayed with us; and him and Captain Hull was together a good deal.  There was some trouble, we heard, because Captain Rayner thought another officer should have been made quartermaster and Mr. Hayne should have stayed with his company, and they had some words; but Captain Hull gave Mr. Hayne a horse and seemed to keep him with him; and that night, in sight of Battle Butte, the steamboat was out of sight ahead when we went into camp, and I was sergeant of the guard and had my fire near the captain’s tent, and twice in the evening Gower came to me and said now was the time to lay hands on the money and skip.  At last he says to me, ’You are flat-broke, and they’ll all be down on you when you get back to the post.  No man in America wants five hundred dollars more than you do.  I’ll give you five hundred in one hour from now if you’ll get the captain out of his tent for half an hour.’  Almost everybody was asleep then; the captain was, and so was Mr. Hayne, and he went on to tell me how he could do it.  He’d been watching the captain.  It made such a big bundle, did the money, in all the separate envelopes that he had done it all up different,—­made a memorandum of the amount due each man, and packed the greenbacks all together in one solid pile,—­his own money, the lieutenant’s, and the men’s,—­done it up in paper and tied it firmly and put big blotches of green sealing-wax on it and sealed them with the seal on his watch-chain.  Says Gower, ’You get the captain out, as I tell you, and I’ll slip right in, get the money, stuff some other paper with a few ones and twos in the package; his seal, his watch, and everything is there in the saddle-bags under his head, and I can reseal and replace it in five minutes, and he’ll never suspect the loss until the command all gets together again next week.  By that time I’ll be three hundred miles away.  Everybody will say ’twas Gower that robbed him, and you with your five hundred will never be suspected.’  I asked him how could he expect the captain to go and leave so much money in his bags with no one to guard it; and he said he’d bet on it if I did it right.  The captain had had no luck tracking Indians that summer, and the regiment was laughing at him.  He knew they were scattering every which way now, and was eager to strike them.  All I had to do was to creep in excited-like, wake him up sudden, and tell him I was sure I had heard an Indian drum and their scalp-dance song out beyond the pickets,—­that they were over towards Battle Butte, and he could hear them if he would come out on the river-bank.  ‘He’d go quick,’ says Gower, ‘and think of nothing.’