one noon upon a broad
path leading up to the main trail where from this union we looked out on
a wide, well-beaten way, I turned an inquiring face toward Morton, who
rode beside me. There was strength in the answer his eyes gave mine. He
had what the latter-day students of psychology call "poise," a grip on
himself. It is by such men that the Plains have been won from a desert
demesne to fruitful fields.

"I gave you warning it was no boy's play," he said simply.

I nodded and we rode on in silence. We pressed westward to where the
smaller streams combine to form the Republican River. The trail here led
us up the Arickaree fork, a shallow stream at this season of the year,
full of sand-bars and gravelly shoals. Here the waters lost themselves
for many feet in the underflow so common in this land of aimless,
uncertain waterways.

On the afternoon of the sixteenth of September the trail led to a little
gorge through which the Arickaree passes in a narrower channel. Beyond
it the valley opened out with a level space reaching back to low hills
on the north, while an undulating plain spread away to the south. The
grass was tall and rank in this open space, which closed in with a bluff
a mile or more to the west. Although it was hardly beyond midafternoon,
Colonel Forsyth halted the company, and we went into camp. We were
almost out of rations. Our horses having no food now, were carefully
picketed out to graze at the end of their lariats. A general sense of
impending calamity pervaded the camp. But the Plainsmen were accustomed
to this kind of thing, and the Civil War soldiers had learned their
lesson at Gettysburg and Chickamauga and Malvern Hill. I was the green
hand, and I dare say my anxiety was greater than that of any other one
there. But I had a double reason for apprehension.

As we had come through the little gorge that afternoon, I was riding
some distance in the rear of the line. Beside me was a boy of eighteen,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, his cheek as smooth as a girl's. His trim little
figure, clad in picturesque buckskin, suggested a pretty actor in a Wild
West play. And yet this boy, Jack Stillwell, was a scout of the
uttermost daring and shrewdness. He always made me think of Bud
Anderson. I even missed Bud's lisp when he spoke.

"Stillwell," I said in a low tone as we rode along, "tell me what you
think of this. Aren't we pretty near the edge? I've felt for three days
as if an Indian was riding beside me a