Hills. Exhausted with the excitement
and fatigue of the day, some few men sleep fitfully at times, and other
few doze once in a while among the watchers. All the livelong night
there is jubilee among the Indians above and below. They keep up their
howlings and war-dances in prospective triumph, for, so far as they can
learn, they have done no more damage to the soldiers than the killing of
a few horses and the wounding of some half a dozen men. Their own loss
has been greater than that, and there is mourning for some of the braves
slain in the combat of the day. They know that escape is impossible to
the soldiers. They feel that with another day they can wear out the
besieged; tempt them into firing off their ammunition, and, if they can
only keep off their friends,--the regiment,--they have them sure.

All the same it is pleasing to Indian ideas of humor to keep up a
delusion among the besieged of having captured their messenger. _We_
know Ray is safely off, but Wayne and his men have no such comfort, for,
for hours the Indians shout their taunts of "Catch white soger; eat 'um
heart," and in their deep anxieties many of the men seem ready to
believe it. To tell the truth, Wayne has hard work keeping up the pluck
and spirits of some of the men, and towards morning the sufferings of
the wounded are more than he can bear. Every little while the roystering
Indians send a rattling fusillade in among the timbers, but do no great
damage beyond making people uncomfortable. Some of them crawl close to
the lines of sentries, but find nothing to encourage further inspection
or advance. But Dana begs to be lifted in his blanket and carried some
distance up-stream, where he can lie on the sand and get away from the
sound of others' suffering, and Wayne and Hunter, with two or three men,
bear him thither, and there, under the starlight and the waning moon,
they lie at full length and softly talk over the situation. There is no
disguising the truth. Their condition is most precarious: hemmed in on
every side; ammunition almost gone, thanks to the reckless extravagance
of the men in twelve hours' fighting, their only hope lies in Ray's
reaching the --th that night and "routing out" the whole command for a
dash to the rescue. They never dreamed, poor fellows, that Ray would
never find the --th where they left it. All hope would have died had
they known their comrades had gone.

Yet that very circumstance stands at this moment in their