they are climbing the range. The morrow will bring them to the
broad and beautiful valley of the Spirit Wolf, and there they must have
news. Officers and men are footsore and weary, but no one begs for rest.
Colonel Maynard, riding ahead on a sorry hack he picked up at the
station two days' long march behind them, is eager to reach the springs
at Forest Glade before ordering bivouac for the night. A week agone no
one who saw him at Sablon would have thought the colonel fit for a march
like this; but he seems rejuvenate. His head is high, his eye as bright,
his bearing as full of spirit, as man's could possibly be at sixty, and
the whole regiment cheered him when he caught the column at Omaha. A
talk with Chester and Armitage seemed to have made a new man of him, and
to-night he is full of an energy that inspires the entire command.
Though they were farther away than many other troops ordered to the
scene, the fact that their station was on the railway and that they
could be sent by special trains to Omaha and thence to the West enabled
them to begin their rescue-march ahead of all the other foot-troops and
behind only the powerful command of cavalry that was whirled to the
scene the moment the authorities woke up to the fact that it should have
been sent in the first place. Old Maynard would give his very ears to
get to Thornton's corral ahead of them, but the cavalry has thirty-six
hours' start and four legs to two. Every moment he looks ahead expectant
of tidings from the front that shall tell him the ----th were there and
the remnant rescued. Even then, he knows, he and his long Springfields
will be needed. The cavalry can fight their way in to the succor of the
besieged, but once there will be themselves surrounded and too few in
numbers to begin aggressive movements. He and his will indeed be welcome
reinforcements; and so they trudge ahead.

The moon is up and it is nearly ten o'clock when high up on the rolling
divide the springs are reached, and, barely waiting to quench their
thirst in the cooling waters, the wearied men roll themselves in their
blankets under the giant trees, and, guarded by a few outlying pickets,
are soon asleep. Most of the officers have sprawled around a little fire
and are burning their boot-leather thereat. The colonel, his adjutant,
and the doctor are curled up under a tent-fly that serves by day as a
wrap for the rations and cooking-kit they carry on pack-mule. Two
company commanders,--