The group of officers in the tent was silent for a long half minute after Colonel Wilson’s voice had stopped.  Then the General spoke.

“There is but one thing to do,” he said.  “We must get word to Captain Thornton at once.”

The Colonel thought deeply a moment, and glanced at the orderly outside the tent.  “Flannigan!” The man, wheeling swiftly, saluted.  “Present my compliments to Lieutenant Morgan and say that I should like to see him here at once,” and the soldier went off, with the quick military precision in which there is no haste and no delay.

“You have some fine, powerful young officers, Colonel,” sail the General casually.  “I suppose we shall see in Lieutenant Morgan one of the best.  It will take strength and brains both, perhaps, for this message.”

A shadow of a smile touched the Colonel’s lips.  “I think I have chosen a capable man, General,” was all he said.

Against the doorway of the tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back and forth.  A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the canvas over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape was blurred—­the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the sluggish, shining river, bending in the distance about the base of Black Wind Mountain—­Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though it was almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of the hills below.  The five officers talked a little as they waited, but spasmodically, absent-mindedly.  A shadow blocked the light of the entrance, and in the doorway stood a young man, undersized, slight, blond.  He looked inquiringly at the Colonel.

“You sent for me, sir?” and the General and his aide, and the grizzled old Captain, and the big, fresh-faced young one, all watched him.

In direct, quiet words—­words whose bareness made them dramatic for the weight of possibility they carried—­the Colonel explained.  Black Wolf and his band were out on the war-path.  A soldier coming in wounded, escaped from the massacre of the post at Devil’s Hoof Gap, had reported it.  With the large command known to be here camped on Sweetstream Fork, they would not come this way; they would swerve up the Gunpowder River twenty miles away, destroying the settlement and Little Fort Slade, and would sweep on, probably for a general massacre, up the Great Horn as far as Fort Doncaster.  He himself, with the regiment, would try to save Fort Slade, but in the meantime Captain Thornton’s troop, coming to join him, ignorant that Black Wolf had taken the war-path, would be directly in their track.  Some one must be sent to warn them, and of course the fewer the quicker.  Lieutenant Morgan would take a sergeant, the Colonel ordered quietly, and start at once.