ten million rattlesnakes
and eight billion polecats had hit me. His club was awful. Then I caught
sight of old Gail's face in the dust-storm, coming back to help me. He
gave the Indian one dose and got one back, a good hard bill, and then
the dust closed in and Gail was off again to the northwest out there,
like a hurricane. I could hear him a mile away. Couldn't I Gail? Where
is Gail?"

Where?

"Oh, back there with the stock!"

No?

"Out there looking over the draw for things that's got all scattered."

No? Not there?

"Oh, he's getting breakfast. And we are all hungry enough to eat raw
Kiowas now."

No? No?

"Gail would be helping the wounded, anyhow, or straightening out dead
men's limbs. Poor fellows--to lose six! It's awful!"

No? No? No?

"Bathing in the river? Where? Over there across the sand-bar?"

Nowhere! Nowhere!

"By the eternal God, they've got him!" Jondo's agonized voice rang
through the camp.

"We can take care of the wounded, and those fellows lying over there
don't need us. But, oh, Gail! They'll torture him to death!" Rex Krane's
voice choked and he ground his teeth.

"Gail, my Gail!" Beverly sat down white and desparingly calm--Beverly,
whose up-bubbling spirits nobody could repress.

The others wrung their hands and cursed and groaned aloud. Only Bill
Banney, the unimaginative and stern-hearted, stood motionless with set
jaws and black-frowning brows. Bill, whom the plains had made hard and
unfeeling.

"We won't give up Gail, will we, Bill?" Jondo spoke sternly, but his
face--they said his face was bright with courage and that his eyes shone
with the inspiration of his will. In all that crowd of eager, faithful
men, he turned now to Bill Banney. Every man had his place on the
plains, and Jondo out of the chrism of his own life-struggle knew that
Bill was bearing a cross in silence, and that his was the martyr spirit
that finds salvation only in deeds. Bill was the man for the place.

And so while straying animals were slowly recovered, while the camp was
set in order, while the dead were laid with simple reverence in
un-coffined graves, and the sick were crudely ministered to, while
Beverly grew feverish and his arrow wound became a festering sore, and
Rex Krane, master of the company, cared for every thing and everybody
with that big mother-heart of his--Jondo and Bill Banney pushed alone
across the desolate plains toward where the Smoky Hills wrapped in their
dim gray-blu