out the agency grounds,
frequently applauding the leaping and hurdling, but only too readily
jeering the awkwardness of some of the men in mounting and dismounting
at the gallop, a thing they had learned and practised since early
boyhood. Then Cranston and the other troop leaders got to working down
toward the agency and, during the rests, moving close up to the corral
and watching the riding-school. It was capital work, said Cranston and
his contemporaries, though some jealous youngsters used to say to their
cynical selves that Parson probably "put up a prayer-meeting as a
stand-off." McPhail and his people began to come out and look on, and
Mira to watch from the window, for she still trembled and shrank at
sight of the savage painted faces and glittering eyes of the Indians,
and equally shrank from meeting the Cranstons. But presently Mrs.
Cranston and other women came driving over in their ambulances, the
generic term by which army carriages were known in the days when a
provident Congress first began curtailing the transportation facilities
of the line where, _sous entendu_, all great reformatory experiments
were tried, the staff being, of course, beyond even congressional
suspicion, and so it resulted that about eleven o'clock every fine day
the biggest gathering of the people, red and white, in all the broad
valley of the Chasing Water, as far east as its confluence with the
shadowy Niobrara and thence to the shores of the Big Muddy, was that to
be found about the rectangular space where the Parson held forth to his
faithful squad.

Now, McPhail came back to his recaptured children with conciliation for
his watchword, willing, eager to shake hands with one and all from Red
Dog down, or up, according to the proper plane of that warrior on the
scale of merit; but as he noted the humility of bearing exhibited by all
except a truculent few, and the evident awe with which even these looked
upon the stern and taciturn commander of his guard, the agent began,
like Mulvaney after his fifth drink, "to think scornful av elephints,"
in other words, of the red wards of his bailiwick, and with McPhail to
"think scornful" was to act. Just in proportion as he was meek and
cringing before did he become arrogant and abusive now. There was no
Boynton on hand to warn him with what he termed brutal bluntness that he
was tempting Providence again. Even the worm will turn, and the
difference between the worm and the Indian is that one