he other companies turned out in
white gloves at retreat, Devers's would come in gauntlets. When dress
parade, dismounted, was ordered at Fort Birney one mild November
evening, he marched his men out in arctics and fur caps, and claimed
that to be the proper full dress for the season. When Colonel Emerson in
regimental orders lauded the devotion of Sergeant Foley, who swam the
icy Missouri with despatches from Captain Cameron's beleaguered command,
and ordered a handsome collar to be made by the regimental saddler to be
worn thereafter by his gallant gray, now transferred to the band
because of the cuts and scars he had received in that fierce campaign,
Devers similarly decorated Trumpeter Finnegan's bull terrier "Mike," who
swam the Mini Ska in pursuit of his master the night of the wintry dash
on Tall Bull's village, and gravely paraded "Mike" with the troop next
muster day. These and a score of similarly annoying yet hardly
punishable attempts to bring ridicule upon or run counter to the orders
of his commanders, had actually rendered some of his seniors so averse
to having him under them that it often resulted in his being given
independent details, lonely detachment duty, "one-company posts," and
similar isolation which almost any other officer would have shrunk from,
but that Devers really seemed to enjoy, and, from having been so much
his own commanding officer, he was all the less fitted to render prompt
and cheerful obedience to others when they again had to have him. With
any command greater than that of a single troop he had never been
intrusted. There was no end of speculation and chaff around the
camp-fires, therefore, early in the summer, when Devers, most
unwillingly, it was said, was hauled in from some outlying post where he
had nothing to do but hunt, eat, and sleep, and reported for duty on
what turned out to be the toughest of Indian campaigns. What was worse,
he was ordered to report to Tintop, and now, said the boys, there _will_
be fun.

Well, there was. It took a week of persistent "cinching" to get Devers
and his troop to understand that they were no longer an independent
body, but must serve under the orders of a colonel or major. He had at
first been put in Bell's battalion, and every time the colonel pointed
out a fault Devers "thought" that was as Major Bell wanted it, and when
Bell called his attention to some irregularity, Devers had understood
Colonel Winthrop to say that that was the way