failed, the matter had been
turned over to General Crook, who had recently brought the savage
Apaches of Arizona under subjection, to employ such means as he found
necessary to defeat their designs.

General Crook found the Sioux and their allies armed with the best
modern breech-loaders, well supplied with ammunition and countless herds
of war ponies, and far too numerous and powerful to be handled by the
small force at his command.

One or two sharp and savage fights occurred in March, while the mercury
was still thirty degrees below zero, and then the government decided on
a great summer campaign. Generals Terry and Gibbon were to hem the
Indians from the north along the Yellowstone, while at the same time
General Crook was to march up and attack them from the south.

When June came, four regiments of cavalry and half a dozen infantry
regiments were represented among the forces that scouted to and fro in
the wild and beautiful uplands of Wyoming, Dakota, and Eastern Montana,
searching for the Sioux.

The families of the officers and soldiers remained at the barracks from
which the men were sent, and even at the exposed stations of Forts
Laramie, Robinson, and Fetterman, many ladies and children remained
under the protection of small garrisons of infantry. Among the ladies at
Laramie was Mrs. McCrea, Ralph's mother, who waited for the return of
her boy from a long absence at school.

A manly, sturdy fellow was Ralph, full of health and vigor, due in great
part to the open-air life he had led in his early boyhood. He had
"backed" an Indian pony before he was seven, and could sit one like a
Comanche by the time he was ten. He had accompanied his father on many a
long march and scout, and had ridden every mile of the way from the Gila
River in Arizona, across New Mexico, and so on up into Nebraska.

He had caught brook trout in the Cache la Poudre, and shot antelope
along the Loup Fork of the Platte. With his father and his father's men
to watch and keep him from harm, he had even charged his first buffalo
herd and had been fortunate enough to shoot a bull. The skin had been
made into a robe, which he carefully kept.

Now, all eager to spend his vacation among his favorite haunts,--in the
saddle and among the mountain streams,--Ralph McCrea was going back to
his army home, when, as ill-luck would have it, the great Sioux war
broke out in the early summer of our Centennial Year, and promised to
greatly interfere w