the first time
to-day."

It was an impressive scene, this impromptu gathering at the foot of the
flag-staff while anxiously awaiting further tidings from the agency.
Over among the quarters the humid eyes of frightened women peered from
many a door-way, watching with fluttering hearts for sign of action.
Stacking arms in front of their barracks, the infantry had been sent in
to a hurried dinner, and the cavalry horses, saddled, still stood at the
lines, watched by a few troopers, while the rest were packing
saddle-bags and taking a bite on their own account. The sentries to the
eastward kept gazing over toward the grim stockade and the clustering
groups of Indian lodges far away down-stream. Ten minutes since a party
of a dozen troopers had been seen to ride slowly away from the agency in
the direction of White Wolf's tepees, a mile beyond; "Davies going to
demand the surrender" were the words that passed from mouth to mouth and
gave the text for the startling conversation that had just taken place,
a topic which was now by common consent dropped as having reached a
point where the utmost caution should be observed. Everybody seemed to
know in some mysterious way that the circulators of the new and
unflattering stories about Davies were not so much the invalid colonel
or Messrs. Flight and Darling of the Fortieth as their more voluble,
active, and dangerous helpmeets. Indeed, the very day Trooper Brannan
arrived, transferred by regimental orders from "A" to "C" troop, he
brought one letter from Mrs. Leonard to Mrs. Cranston, and two or three,
each, of the missives of Mesdames Stone, Flight, and Darling to ladies
at the cantonment. Mrs. Leonard's letter said that her husband, the
adjutant, had been summoned by telegraph to General Sheridan's office in
Chicago, and he expected to be gone a week. No trace had been found of
the papers stolen from his desk, but it was undoubtedly on that business
that he had been sent for, and Mrs. Leonard felt confident that when he
returned it would be with news that full justice would at last be
awarded Mr. Davies for his conduct during the campaign as well as at the
agency, and Mrs. Leonard could not control the impulse to add, "If
justice could only be meted out to his accuser!--but will that man ever
get his deserts?"

It must be owned that Mrs. Leonard had good grounds for being doubtful
on that point.

Meantime how fared it with the embassy to White Wolf? Smarting under the
inju