n
were tortured to death, while the mother herself--God pity her--was not
only tortured, but what was more cruel, was kept alive.

Across the Saline Valley, over the divide, and up the Solomon River
Valley this band of demons pushed their way. Behind them were hot ashes
where homes had been, and putrid, unburied bodies of murdered men and
children, mutilated beyond recognition. On their ponies, bound hand and
foot, were wretched, terror-stricken women. The smiling Plains lay
swathed in the August sunshine, and the richness of purple twilights,
and of rose-hued day dawns, and the pitiless noontime skies of brass
only mocked them in their misery. Did a merciful God forget the Plains
in those days of prairie conquest? No force rose up to turn Black Kettle
and his murderous horde back from the imperilled settlements until
loaded with plunder, their savage souls sated with cruelty, with
helpless captives for promise of further fiendish sport, they headed
southward and escaped untouched to their far-away village in the
pleasant, grassy lands that border the Washita River.

Not all their captives went with them, however. With these "good
Indians," recipients of the Fort Hays bounty, were two women, mothers of
a few months, not equal to the awful tax of human endurance. These,
bound hand and foot, they staked out on the solitary Plains under the
blazing August skies, while their tormentors rode gayly away to join
their fat, lazy squaws awaiting them in the southland by the winding
Washita.

This was the story Morton was telling to me as we sat in the dusk by his
cabin door. This was the condition of those fair Kansas River valleys,
for the Cheyennes under Black Kettle were not the only foes here. Other
Cheyenne bands, with the Sioux, the Brules, and the Dog Indians from
every tribe were making every Plains trail a warpath.

"The captives are probably all dead by this time; but the crimes are not
avenged, and the settlers are no safer than they were before the raid,"
Morton was saying. "Governor Crawford and the Governor of Colorado have
urged the authorities at Washington to protect our frontier, but they
have done nothing. Now General Sheridan has decided to act anyhow. He
has given orders to Colonel George A. Forsyth of the U. S. Cavalry, to
make up a company of picked men to go after the Cheyennes at once. There
are some two hundred of them hiding somewhere out in the Solomon or the
Republican River country. It is busine