The sun glared fiercely on the bare, brown earth. A burning thirst began
to parch our lips. We had had no food nor drink for more than twenty
hours. Our horses, wounded with many arrows, were harder to care for
than our brave, stricken men.

Night came upon the canons of the Prairie Dog, and with the darkness the
firing ceased. Somewhere, not far away, there might be a wagon-train
with food for us. And somewhere near there might be a hundred men or
more of our command trying to reach us. But, whether the force and
supplies were safe or the wagons were captured and all our comrades
killed, as Charlie Bent had said, we could not know. We only knew that
we had no food; that one man, and all but four of our cavalry horses
lay dead out in the valley; that two men in our midst were slowly dying,
and a dozen others suffering from wounds of battle, among these our
captain and Scout Pliley; that we were in a wild, strange land, with
Indians perching, vulture-like, on every hill-top, waiting for dawn to
come to seize their starving prey.

We heard an owl hoot here and there, and farther off an answering hoot;
a coyote's bark, a late bird's note, another coyote, and a fainter hoot,
all as night settled. And we knew that owl and coyote and twilight
song-bird were only imitations--sentinel signals from point to point,
where Indian videttes guarded every height, watching the trail with
shadow-piercing eyes.

The glossy cottonwood leaves, in the faint night breeze, rippled like
pattering rain-drops on dry roofs in summertime, and the thin, willow
boughs swayed gently over us. The full moon swept grandly up the
heavens, pouring a flood of softened light over the valley of the
Prairie Dog, whose steep bluffs were guarded by a host of blood-lusting
savages, and whose canons locked in a handful of intrepid men.

If we could only slip out, undiscovered, in the dark we might find our
command somewhere along the creek. It was a perilous thing to undertake,
but to stay there was more perilous.

"Say, Gail," Beverly whispered, when we were in motion, "somebody said
once, 'There have been no great nations without processions,' but this
is the darndest procession I ever saw to help to make a nation great.
Hold on, comrade. There! Rest on my arm a bit. It makes it softer."

The last words to a wounded soldier for whom Bev's grip eased the ride.

It was a strange procession, and in that tragic gloom the boy's
light-hearted words were balm