im
here at once," and the soldier went off, with the quick military
precision in which there is no haste and no delay.

"You have some fine, powerful young officers, Colonel," said the General
casually. "I suppose we shall see in Lieutenant Morgan one of the best.
It will take strength and brains both, perhaps, for this message."

A shadow of a smile touched the Colonel's lips. "I think I have chosen
a capable man, General," was all he said.

Against the doorway of the tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back and
forth. A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the canvas
over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape was
blurred--the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the sluggish,
shining river, bending in the distance about the base of Black Wind
Mountain--Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though it was
almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of the hills
below. The five officers talked a little as they waited, but
spasmodically, absent-mindedly. A shadow blocked the light of the
entrance, and in the doorway stood a young man, undersized, slight,
blond. He looked inquiringly at the Colonel.

"You sent for me, sir?" and the General and his aide, and the grizzled
old Captain, and the big, fresh-faced young one, all watched him.

In direct, quiet words--words whose bareness made them dramatic for the
weight of possibility they carried--the Colonel explained. Black Wolf
and his band were out on the war-path. A soldier coming in wounded,
escaped from the massacre of the post at Devil's Hoof Gap, had reported
it. With the large command known to be here camped on Sweetstream Fork,
they would not come this way; they would swerve up the Gunpowder River
twenty miles away, destroying the settlement and Little Fort Slade, and
would sweep on, probably for a general massacre, up the Great Horn as
far as Fort Doncaster. He himself, with the regiment, would try to save
Fort Slade, but in the meantime, Captain Thornton's troop, coming to
join him, ignorant that Black Wolf had taken the war-path, would be
directly in their track. Some one must be sent to warn them, and of
course the fewer the quicker. Lieutenant Morgan would take a sergeant,
the Colonel ordered quietly, and start at once.

In the misty light inside the tent, the young officer looked hardly more
than seventeen years old as he stood listening. His small figure was
light, fragile; his hair was blond to a