friendliness had come to us through the Mexican
caravan which could have no object in deceiving us, since it was on its
way to Kansas City to do business with the Clarenden house there. And
Jondo had sent a spy by night into the Kiowa camp as if they were not to
be trusted. Yet they had taken no offense; but, letting me keep my
firearms, had led me into their council on the top of Pawnee Rock, where
they had told me in clear English that they had nothing but love for the
white brothers of the plains. And to prove it we should pass unharmed
along the trail where once we had wronged them by stealing their
captive. The prairies were wide enough for all of us and they had
forgotten--as an Indian always forgets--all malice against us. They had
sent me back to camp with greetings to my captain, and had gone on their
way to the heart of the Grand Prairie in the northeast.

It was only Jondo, as he rode wide of the trail for two days, who could
see any mark of an Indian's track. And we had not believed Jondo. We
never made that mistake again: But trust in his shrewdness now, however,
would not bring back the oxen lost and the mules and ponies captured by
the thieving band of Dog Indians. But there was a greater loss than
these. The Kiowas had come for revenge. It was blood, not plunder, they
wanted. A dozen men with arrow wounds reported at roll call, and six men
lay stark dead under the pitiless sky. Among them Davis of the St. Louis
train, who had been too ill to take part in the struggle. One more loss
was there to report, but it was not discovered until later.

Indians seldom leave their dead on the field of battle, but the
blood-stained sod beside their fallen ponies told a story of heavy toll.
Blood marked the trail of hoofprints to the northwest in their wild rout
thither. One comrade they had missed in their flight. He lay down near
the river where the ground had been threshed over by the stampeded
stock. He must have been a giant in life, for his was the longest grave
made in the prairie sod that day. At the river's edge the sands were
pricked with hoofprints, where the struggle to carry away the dead
seemed to have reached clear into the thin yellow current of the
Arkansas, although no trail led out on the far side of the stream.

"That's the very copper cuss with yellow trimmings who had me down when
that arrow stopped me," Beverly exclaimed. "He was seven feet tall and
streaked with yellow just that way. I thought