ce, shouldered that spade, and stalked straight down
the bank, across the creek, and up to our works in the centre of the
island as upright and free as if I were walking up Cliff Street to Judge
Baronet's front door. Jean's words had put into me just what I
needed--not acceptance of the inevitable, but a power of resistance, the
indomitable spirit that overcomes.

History is stranger than fiction, and the story of the Kansas frontier
is more tragical than all the Wild West yellow-backed novels ever turned
off the press. To me this campaign of the Arickaree has always read like
a piece of bloody drama, so terrible in its reality, it puts the
imagination out of service.

We had only one chance for deliverance, we must get the tidings of our
dreadful plight to Fort Wallace, a hundred miles away. Jack Stillwell
and another brave scout were chosen for the dangerous task. At midnight
they left us, moving cautiously away into the black blank space toward
the southwest, and making a wide detour from their real line of
direction. The Indians were on the alert, and a man must walk as
noiselessly as a panther to slip between their guards.

The scouts wore blankets to resemble the Indians more closely in the
shadows of the night. They made moccasins out of boot tops, that their
footprints might tell no story. In sandy places they even walked
backward that they should leave no tell-tale trail out of the valley.

Dawn found them only three miles away from their starting place. A
hollow bank overhung with long, dry grasses, and fronted with rank
sunflowers, gave them a place of concealment through the daylight hours.
Again on the second night they hurried cautiously forward. The second
morning they were near an Indian village. Their only retreat was in the
tall growth of a low, marshy place. Here they crouched through another
long day. The unsuspecting squaws, hunting fuel, tramped the grasses
dangerously near to them, but a merciful Providence guarded their
hiding-place.

On the third night they pushed forward more boldly, hoping that the next
day they need not waste the precious hours in concealment. In the early
morning they saw coming down over the prairie the first guard of a
Cheyenne village moving southward across their path. The Plains were
flat and covertless. No tall grass, nor friendly bank, nor bush, nor
hollow of ground was there to cover them from their enemies. But out
before them lay the rotting carcass of an old