der a sheltering cotton-wood, were
suddenly summoned by a trooper coming in on the run from the outpost
below, a mile at least from where they had buried poor Gamble.
"Indians, sir," said he, "and lots of 'em, coming up the valley on the
other bank."

"Douse your fires, there!" was the first order. "Look well to your
horses, sergeant. Stay here in charge. I'll send word what to do."

Then, with eager stride, Geordie hurried away after the messenger,
Connell close at his heels. Two hundred yards they followed, winding
along under the bank, and presently came to a sharp bend, beyond which
and across the stream the prairie lay open and undulating for many a
league, the only obstruction to the view being a little grove of
cotton-woods on the opposite shore and possibly half a mile away, and
that little grove and the level bench about it were alive with Indians
and Indian ponies, the former at least in high state of excitement.

Kneeling behind the trunk of a fallen cotton-wood, two troopers were
intently studying the situation. "They came riding down from over
yonder to the northeast, sir," said one of them, a corporal, making
room for his lieutenant. "There must have been as many as a hundred all
told, with others trailing behind. There's going to be a pow-wow of
some kind. They've unsaddled and turned the ponies out, and some
feller's shoutin' and singin'--you can hear him now, sir."

Hear him! As he warmed up to his speech, incantation, or whatever it
was, the speaker could have been heard distinctly a long mile away, and
all the bivouac up-stream, not already sound asleep, sat up to listen.
War-chief or medicine-man, he had a voice that dinned upon the ear of
night and dominated all other sounds, from guttural grunt of assent to
frantic yell of applause, as the roar of Niagara in the Cave of the
Winds drowns the futile babble of the guides. Once in early boyhood
Geordie had heard an Indian orator of whom his father and
fellow-officers spoke ever in honor and esteem--a chief whose people
wellnigh worshipped him--"Rolling-Thunder-in-the-Mountains," they
called him ("Hin-Mato-Iya-Latkit," in their weird dialect). And as
George and Connell knelt here now, listening to this deep, reverberant
voice, thundering from bluff to bluff across the mile-wide valley, the
name and fame of old Chief Joseph, whom the whites had so misunderstood
and wronged, came back to the young commander with redoubled force.

But no such chief as