Ordinarily when making summer marches over the range, the first "water camp" on the Sweetwater trail was here at Cañon Springs. On the road to Frayne, which crossed the brook ten miles to the east, all wagon trains and troops not on forced march made similar camp. In the case of scouting detachments or little parties sent out from Emory, it was always customary to spend the first night and make the first camp on the Box Elder at furthermost, then to push on, ready and refreshed, the following day. Dean well knew that to get the best work out of his horses he should start easily, and up to nine o'clock he had fully intended to make the usual camp at the Springs. But once before, within a few years, a big scouting party camping in the gorge of the Box Elder had been surprised by one of those sudden, sweeping storms, and before they could strike tents, pack up and move to higher ground, the stream took matters into its own hands and spared them all further trouble on that score, distributing camp and garrison equipage for long leagues away to the east. Two miles back, trooper Carey, who had been complaining of severe cramp and pain in the stomach, begged to be allowed to fall out and rest awhile. He was a reliable old soldier when whisky was not winning the upper hand, and this time whisky was not at fault. A dose of Jamaica ginger was the only thing their field pharmacopoeia provided, and Carey rolled out of his saddle and doubled up among the rocks with his hands on the pit of his stomach, grimacing.
"Go back if you think best, or come ahead and catch us at the Springs if well enough," were the orders left him, while the men pushed on, and now, as the lieutenant said, Carey was coming himself. Some of the party were already dozing when the sergeant's sharp order "Saddle up" was given, but a glance at the lowering sky explained it all, and every man was standing to horse and ready when the missing trooper came jogging in among them, white, peaked, but determined. A look of mingled disappointment and relief appeared on his face as he saw the preparations for the start, but his only comment was, "I can make it, sir," as he saluted his young commander. Less than two hours from the time they unsaddled, therefore, the troopers once more mounted, and, following their leader, filed away down the winding gorge. Presently there came the low rumble of thunder, and a sweep of the rising wind. "Trot," said Dean, and without other word the little column quickened the pace.
The ravine grew wider soon and far less tortuous, but was still a narrow and dangerous spot. For a mile or two from the Springs its course was nearly east of north, then it bore away to the northeast, and the Sweetwater trail abruptly left it and went winding up a cleft in the hills to the west. Just as they reached this point the heavens opened and the clouds descended in a deluge of rain. Out came the ponchos, unstrapped from the saddle, and every man's head popped through the slit as the shiny black "shedwater" settled down on his shoulders.
"That outfit behind us will get a soaking if it has been fool enough to follow down to the Springs," said Carey to the sergeant, as they began the pull up the slippery trail.
"What outfit?" asked Dean, turning in the saddle and looking back in surprise.
A blinding flash of lightning, followed almost on the instant by the crack and roar of thunder, put summary stop to talk of any kind. Men and horses bowed their heads before the deluge and the rain ran in streams from the manes and tails. The ascending path turned quickly into a running brook and the black forms of steeds and riders struggled sidewise up the grass-grown slopes in search of higher ground. The heavens had turned inky black. The gloomy ravine grew dark as night. Flash after flash the lightning split the gloom. Every second or two trooper faces gleamed ghastly in the dazzling glare, then as suddenly vanished. Horses slipped or stumbled painfully and, man after man, the riders followed the example of the young soldier in the lead and, dismounting, led their dripping beasts farther up the steep incline. Halfway to the summit, peering through the wind-swept sheets of rain, a palisaded clump of rocks jutted out from the heights and, after a hard climb, the little band found partial shelter from the driving storm, and huddled, awe-stricken, at their base. Still the lightning played and the thunder cannonaded with awful resonance from crag to crag down the deep gorge from which they had clambered, evidently none too soon, for presently, far down the black depths, they could see the Box Elder, under a white wreath of foam, tearing in fury down its narrow bed.
"Beg pardon, lieutenant," shouted the veteran sergeant in the young commander's ear, even in that moment never forgetting the habitual salute, "but if I didn't see the reason for that sudden order to saddle I more than see it now. We would have been drowned like rats down there in the gulch."
"I'm wondering if anybody has drowned like rats," shouted Dean, in reply. "Carey says another party was just behind us. Who could they be?"
But for answer came another vivid, dazzling flash that for an instant blinded all eyes. "By God! but that's a stunner!" gasped a big trooper, and then followed the deafening bang and crash of the thunder, and its echoes went booming and reverberating from earth to heaven and rolling away, peal after peal, down the bluff-bound cañon. For a moment no other sound could be heard; then, as it died away and the rain came swashing down in fresh deluge, Carey's voice overmastered the storm.
"That's struck something, sir, right around yonder by the Springs. God help that outfit that came a-gallopin' after me!"
"What was it? Which way were they coming?" Dean managed to ask.
"Right along the bluff, sir, to the east. Seemed like they was ridin' over from the old camp on the Frayne road. There was twenty-five or thirty of 'em, I should say, coming at a lope."
"Cavalry?" asked Dean, a queer look in his face.
"No, sir. They rode dispersed like. They was a mile away when I sighted them, and it was gittin' so black then I don't think they saw me at all. They were 'bout off yonder, half a mile east of the Springs when I dipped down into the ravine, and what seemed queer was that two of them galloped to the edge, dismounted, and were peering down into the gorge like so many Indians, just as though they didn't want to be seen. I was goin' to tell the lieutenant 'bout it first thing if I had found our fellows off their guard, but you were all mounted and just starting."
Instinctively Dean put forth his hand under the dripping poncho and tugged at the straps of his off saddle-bag. No need for dread on that score. The bulky package, wrapped, sealed and corded, was bulging out of the side of his field pouch till it looked as though he had crammed a cavalry boot into its maw.
"Thirty men—mounted?—no wagons or—anything?" he anxiously asked.
"Full thirty, sir, and every man armed with rifle as far as I could see," said Carey, "and if it was us they was after, they'd have had us at their mercy down in that pocket at the Springs."
A shout from one of the men attracted the attention of the leaders. The storm had spent its force and gone rolling away eastward. The thunder was rumbling far over toward the now invisible crest of the Black Hills of Wyoming. The rain sheets had given place to trickling downpour. A dim light was stealing into the blackness of the gorge. Louder and fiercer roared the Box Elder, lashing its banks with foam. And then came the cry again.
"I tell you it is, by God! for there goes another!"
All eyes followed the direction of the pointing finger. All eyes saw, even though dimly, the saddled form of a horse plunging and struggling in the flood, making vain effort to clamber out, then whirling helplessly away—swept out of sight around the shoulder of bluff, and borne on down the tossing waves of the torrent. Men mean no irreverence when they call upon their Maker at such times, even in soldier oath. It is awe, not blasphemy.
"By God, lieutenant, that's what we'd a been doing but for your order." It was the sergeant who spoke.
And at that very hour there was excitement at Fort Emory. At eight o'clock the colonel was on his piazza looking with gloomy eyes over the distant rows of empty barracks. The drum-major with the band at his heels came stalking out over the grassy parade, and the post adjutant, girt with sash and sword-belt, stood in front of his office awaiting the sergeant-major, who
was unaccountably delayed. Reduced to a shadow, the garrison at Fort Emory might reasonably have been excused, by this time, from the ceremony of mounting a guard, consisting practically of ten privates, three of whom wore the cavalry jacket; but old "Pecksniff" was determined to keep up some show of state. He could have no parade or review, but at least he could require his guard to be mounted with all the pomp and ceremony possible. He would have ordered his officers out in epaulets and the full dress "Kossuth" hat of the period, but epaulets had been discarded during the war and not yet resumed on the far frontier. So the rank and file alone were called upon to appear in the black-feathered oddity a misguided staff had designed as the headgear of the array. "Pecksniff's" half-dozen doughboys, therefore, with their attendant sergeants and corporals in the old fashioned frock and felt, and a still smaller squad of troopers in yellow-trimmed jackets and brass-mounted forage caps, were drawn up at the edge of the parade awaiting the further signal of adjutant's call, while the adjutant himself swore savagely and sent the orderly on the run for the sergeant-major. When that clock-governed functionary was missing something indeed must be going wrong.
Presently the orderly came running back.
"Sergeant Dineen isn't home, sir, and his wife says he hasn't been back since the lieutenant sent him in town with the last dispatch."
"Tell the first sergeant of "B" Company, then, to act as sergeant-major at once," said the adjutant, and hurried over to his colonel. "Dineen's not back, sir," he reported at the gate. "Can anything be wrong?"
"I ordered him to bring with him the answer to my dispatch to the general, who wired to me from the railway depot at Cheyenne. Probably he's been waiting for that, and the general's away somewhere. We ought to have an operator here day and night," said Pecksniff petulantly. But the irritation in his eyes gave way to anxiety when at that moment the sutler's buggy was seen dashing into the garrison at headlong speed, his smart trotter urged almost to a run. Griggs reined up with no little hard pulling at the colonel's gate, and they could see a dozen yards off that his face was pale.
"Have you any idea, colonel," he began the moment the officers reached him, "where Major Burleigh can be? He left the depot somewhere about three o'clock this morning with that Captain Newhall. He hasn't returned and can't be found. Your sergeant-major was waylaid and robbed some time after midnight, and John Folsom was picked up senseless in the alley back of his house two hours ago. What does it all mean?"
* * *
CHAPTER XVII.
That storm-burst along the range had turned for twenty-four hours every mountain stream into a foaming torrent for a hundred miles. Not a bridge remained along the Platte. Not a ford was fordable within two days' march of either Emory or Frayne. Not a courier crossed the Box Elder, going either way, until the flood went down, and then it transpired that a tide in the affairs of men had also turned, and that there was trouble ahead for some who had thought to find plain sailing. For two days watchers along the lower Box Elder dragged out upon the shallows the bodies of horses that once upon a time might have borne the "U. S." brand, but were not girthed with cavalry saddles now. Nor were there lacking other bodies to prove that the victims of the sudden storm were not Uncle Sam's men, much as two, at least, of the drowned had been wanted by Federal authorities but a week before. What the denizens of Gate City and Fort Emory dreaded and expected to bear was that Dean and his little party had been caught in the trap. But, living or dead, not a sign of them remained along the storm-swept ravine. What most people of Gate City and Fort Emory could not understand was the evidence that a big gang of horse thieves, desperadoes and renegades had suddenly appeared about the new town, had spurred away northward in the night, had kept the Frayne road till they reached the Box Elder, riding hard long after sun-up, and there, reinforced, they had gone westward to the Sweetwater trail, and, old frontiersmen though they were, had been caught in the whirl of water at Cañon Springs, losing two of their number and at least a dozen of their horses. What could have lured them into that gloomy rift at such a time? What inspiration had led Dean out of it?
Singly or in little squads, many of them afoot, bedraggled, silent, chagrined, the "outfit," described by Trooper Carey had slunk away from the neighborhood of the Box Elder as soon as the storm subsided. Solemnly, as befitted soldiers, silent and and alert despite their dripping accoutrements, the little detachment of cavalry had pushed ahead, riding by compass over the drenched uplands, steering for the Sweetwater. Late in the afternoon the skies had cleared, the sun came out, and they camped in a bunch of cottonwoods on the old Casper trail and slept the sleep of the just and the weary. Early next day they hastened on, reaching the usually shallow stream, with Devil's Gate only a few miles away, before the setting of a second sun. Here they feasted and rested well, and before the dawn was fairly red on the third day out from Emory they were breasting the turbid waters and by noon had left the valley far to the south and were well out toward the Big Horn country, where it behooved them to look warily ahead, for from every ridge, though far to the west of their probable raiding ground, Dean and his men could expect to encounter scouting parties of the Indians at any moment, and one false step meant death.
The third night passed without alarm, though every eye and ear was strained. The morning of the fourth day dawned and the sun soon tinged the misty mountain tops to the far north, and Dean saw before him an open rolling country, over which it would be impossible to march without attracting Indian eyes, if Indian eyes there were within twenty miles. And with proper caution he ordered his men to keep in concealment, horses grazing under guard in a deep depression near a stream, men dozing soundly by turns until the twilight came, and then the stars—their night lights for a long, long march. Dawn of the fifth day found them huddled in a deep ravine of the southern foothills, with Warrior Gap not thirty miles away, and now, indeed, was prudence necessary, for the faint light showed the fresh prints of innumerable pony hoofs on every side. They were close on Machpealota's lurking braves. Which would see the other first?
It must have been somewhere toward five o'clock in the afternoon that Dean, searching with his field glass the sunlit slopes far out to the east, heard the voice of his sergeant close at hand and turned to answer. Up to this moment, beyond the pony tracks, not a sign had they seen of hostile Indians, but the buffalo that had appeared in scattered herds along their line of march were shy and scary, and old hands said that that meant they had recently been hunted hard. Moreover, this was not a section favored of the buffalo. There was much alkali and sage brush along their trail, and only here and there in scanty patches any of the rich, nutritious bunch grass which the roving animals so eagerly sought. The day had been hot and almost cloudless. The shimmer of heat along the lazy roll of the land to the south had often baffled their blinking eyes. But now the sun was well to the west, and the refraction seemed diminishing, and away over to the northeast a dull-colored cloud seemed slowly rising beyond the ridges. It was this that Sergeant Bruce was studying when he murmured to his young commander:
"I think that means a big herd on the run, sir, and if so Indians started them."
One or two troopers, dozing close at hand, sprawled full length upon the ground, with their faces buried in, or hidden by, their blue-sleeved arms, slowly rolled over and came crouching up alongside. Dean dropped his glasses and peered in the direction indicated by his comrade of humbler rank. Dust cloud it was beyond a doubt, and a long peep through the binocular proved that it was slowly sailing across the horizon in a northerly direction. Did that mean that the red hunters were driving the great quarry toward the village of the Sioux, or that the young men were out in force, and with the full complement of squaws and ponies, were slaughtering on the run. If the former, then Dean and his party would be wise to turn eastward and cross the trail of the chase. If the latter they would stand better chance of slipping through to the Gap by pushing northward, deeper in among the pine-crested heights.
Behind the watchers, well down in
the ravine, the horses were placidly nibbling at the scant herbage, or lazily sprawling in the sun, each animal securely hoppled, and all carefully guarded by the single trooper, whose own mount, ready saddled, circled within the limits of the stout lariat, looped about his master's wrist. All spoke of caution, of lively sense of danger and responsibility, for they of the little detachment were picked men, who had ridden the warpath too long not to realize that there was no such thing as trusting to luck in the heart of the Indian country, especially when Machpealota with his Ogallalla braves was out for business. The cautious movements of the group along the bank had quickly been noted by the wakeful ones among the troopers, and presently the entire party, excepting only the herd guard, had crouched up alongside, and with the comradeship born of such perilous service, were now discussing the situation in low, confidential tones.
For half an hour they lay there, studying the signs to the northeast. The dun colored cloud hung low over the earth for a distance of several miles. The herd was evidently one of unusual size even for those days when the buffalo swarmed in countless thousands, and finally the sergeant spoke again.
"It's a big hunt, lieutenant. Whatever may be going on about the Gap they've found time to send out young men enough to round up most of the buffalo north of the Platte and drive them in toward the mountains. It's combining pleasure with business. They don't feel strong enough in number, perhaps, to make another attempt on troops armed with breech-loaders, so while they're waiting until their reinforcements come, or their own breech-loaders, they are herding the buffalo where they can get them when they want them later on. We are in big luck that no stragglers are anywhere around us; if they were it wouldn't take such fellows long to spy us out."
Dean swept the ridge line with his glass. No sign of life nearer than that far-away, betraying dust cloud. No symptom of danger anywhere within their ken. He was thinking at the moment of that precious package in his saddle-bags and the colonel's words impressing him with the sense of responsibility the night they parted at Fort Emory. To-morrow, by sunrise, if fortune favored him, he could turn it over to the commanding officer at the new stockade, and then if the Indians were not gathered in force about the post and actually hostile, he could slip out again at night and make swift dash for the Platte and the homeward way, and then within the week rejoin his sister at Fort Emory—his sister and "Pappoose." Never before had the Indian pet name carried such significance as now. Night and day those soft, dark eyes—that beautiful face—haunted his thoughts and filled his young heart with new and passionate longing. It was hard to have to leave the spot her presence made enchanted ground. Nothing but the spur of duty, the thrill of soldier achievement and stirring venture could have reconciled him to that unwelcome order.
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