ng up with a cob-stoppered flask in her hand, half filled with a
pale yellow-white fluid, "ain't it about time for some of that thar
anarthestic I heerd you all talking about a while ago?"

"I shouldn't wonder," said Orme. "The stitching hurts about as much as
anything. Auberry, can't you find me a bit of sinew somewhere, and
perhaps a needle of some sort?"

CHAPTER XIX

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

A vast dizziness and a throbbing of the head remained after they were
quite done with me, but something of this left me when finally I sat
leaning back against the wagon body and looked about me. There were
straight, motionless figures lying under the blankets in the shade, and
under other blankets were men who writhed and moaned. Belknap passed
about the place, graver and apparently years older than at the beginning
of this, his first experience in the field. He put out burial parties at
once. A few of the Sioux, including the one on whom Andrew Jackson
McGovern had vented his new-found spleen, were covered scantily where
they lay. Our own dead were removed to the edge of the bluff; and so
more headstones, simple and rude, went to line the great pathway into
the West.

Again Ellen Meriwether came and sat by me. She had now removed the gray
traveling gown, for reasons which I could guess, and her costume might
have been taken from a collector's chest rather than a woman's wardrobe.
All at once we seemed, all of us, to be blending with these
surroundings, becoming savage as these other savages. It might almost
have been a savage woman who came to me.

Her skirt was short; made of white tanned antelope leather. Above it
fell the ragged edges of a native tunic or shirt of yellow buck,
ornamented with elk teeth, embroidered in stained quills. Her feet still
wore a white woman's shoes, although the short skirt was enforced by
native leggins, beaded and becylindered in metals so that she tinkled as
the walked. Her hair, now becoming yellower and more sunburned at the
ends, was piled under her felt hat, and the modishness of long
cylindrical curls was quite forgot. The brown of her cheeks, already
strongly sunburned, showed in strange contrast to the snowy white of her
neck, now exposed by the low neck aperture of the Indian tunic. Her
gloves, still fairly fresh, she wore tucked through her belt, army
fashion. I could see the red heart still, embroidered on the cuff!

She came and sat down beside me on the ground, I say, a