"but where do we come in on this campaign? What will be said of
our failure to get into the fight?"

"What a growler you are, Canker! Why, man, in matters of this kind
individual ambition must give place to concerted plans. It's the _team_
work, the _combinations_ that tell." And here the silent circle became
engrossed in pipes or in whittling, or in the contemplation of the very
ground at their feet, though from under the broad brims of their
scouting hats veteran campaigners exchanged meaning glances. Canker only
growled the more sulkily.

"What I'm afraid of, Major Chrome, is that Colonel Winthrop may have
wanted us this very day, and forty miles wouldn't have reached him."

"My heaven!" said Cranston, later that night, tossing upward his
clinched fists and nervous straining arms, "I feel like a man in a
nightmare. One long winter of incessant friction and undecided
clashings with Devers, and now this mad eagerness to be doing something
choked and smothered by this incubus at our head. If to-morrow brings no
relief I want to quit for good and all."

But the long weeks of indecisive warfare, in camp as in the field, were
destined to have their climax at last. Well for the little battalion,
perhaps, was it, after all, that officers and men alike were boiling
over with repressed, pent-up fury for action, for when the morrow came
it called each soldier into line, and gave him giant work to do.

Somewhere towards one o'clock in the morning, under the glitter and
sheen of the myriad stars overhead, while, all but the guard, the
troopers slept peacefully upon the prairie turf and, all but a few early
risers, their chargers, too, were drowsing undisturbed by the occasional
querulous yelp of the coyote,--somewhere, far out over the dim, shadowy
slopes to the westward, there rose upon the night the faint sound of a
trumpet call, seemingly miles away. In his extreme caution Chrome had
posted little parties full a mile out from the bivouac, north, east, and
west, and it was while slowly riding to the westernmost of these that
the officer of the guard first thought he heard the sound. A corporal of
Cranston's troop was at his heels. "Yes, sir," he said, in answer to the
low, eager question, as the two reined in their horses, "I could almost
swear I heard it. I couldn't make out the signal though--could only hear
a note or two." They found the picket alert, even excited. They, too,
had heard something very like a faint trumpet