epartment ordered the captains to catch Indians,
the wives bade them Godspeed. When the Interior Department ordered the
captains to let the Indians go again, still they made the best of it.
You must not waste Indians. Indians were a source of revenue to so many
people in Washington and elsewhere. But the process of catching Indians,
armed with weapons sold them by friends of the Interior Department, was
not entirely harmless. Therefore there came to be graves in the Drybone
graveyard. The pale weather-washed head-boards told all about it:
"Sacred to the memory of Private So-and-So, killed on the Dry Cheyenne,
May 6, 1875." Or it would be, "Mrs. So-and-So, found scalped on Sage
Creek." But even the financiers at Washington could not wholly preserve
the Indian in Drybone's neighborhood. As the cattle by ten thousands
came treading with the next step of civilization into this huge domain,
the soldiers were taken away. Some of them went West to fight more
Indians in Idaho, Oregon, or Arizona. The battles of the others being
done, they went East in better coffins to sleep where their mothers or
their comrades wanted them. Though wind and rain wrought changes upon
the hill, the ready-made graves and boxes which these soldiers left
behind proved heirlooms as serviceable in their way as were the
tenements that the living had bequeathed to Drybone. Into these
empty barracks came to dwell and do business every joy that made the
cow-puncher's holiday, and every hunted person who was baffling the
sheriff. For the sheriff must stop outside the line of Drybone, as
shall presently be made clear. The captain's quarters were a saloon now;
professional cards were going in the adjutant's office night and day;
and the commissary building made a good dance-hall and hotel. Instead
of guard-mounting, you would see a horse-race on the parade-ground, and
there was no provost-sergeant to gather up the broken bottles and old
boots. Heaps of these choked the rusty fountain. In the tufts of yellow,
ragged grass that dotted the place plentifully were lodged many aces
and queens and ten-spots, which the Drybone wind had blown wide from the
doors out of which they had been thrown when a new pack was called for
inside. Among the grass tufts would lie visitors who had applied for
beds too late at the dance-hall, frankly sleeping their whiskey off in
the morning air.

Above, on the hill, the graveyard quietly chronicled this new epoch of
Drybone. So-and-