Near her lay her two-year-old
baby boy. With her little one, she had been murdered to prevent her
rescue, on the morning of Custer's attack on the Cheyennes, murdered
with the music of the cavalry band sounding down the valley, and with
the shouts and shots of her own people, ringing a promise of life and
hope to her.

Bud hadn't been with Forsyth, and he was not quite ready for this. He
stooped and stroked the woman's hair tenderly and then lifted a white
face up toward me. "It would have happened to Marjie, Phil, long ago,
but for O'mie. They were Kiowath, too," he said in a low voice.

After that moment there was no more doubt for me. I knew why I had been
spared in Colorado, and I consecrated myself to the fighting duty of an
American citizen, "Through famine and fire and frost," I vowed to
myself, "I give my strength to this work, even unto death if God wills
it."

Tenderly, for soldiers can be tender, the body of the mother and her
baby were wrapped in a blanket and placed in one of the wagons, to be
carried many miles and to wait many days before they were laid to rest
at last in the shadow of Fort Arbuckle.

I saw much of O'mie. In the army as in Springvale, he was everybody's
friend. But the bitter winter did not alleviate that little hacking
cough of his. Instead of the mild vigor of the sunny Plains, that we had
looked for was the icy blast with its penetrating cold, as sudden in its
approach as it was terrible in its violence. Sometimes even now on
winter nights when the storms sweep across the west prairie and I hear
them hurl their wrathful strength against this stanch stone house with
its rounded turret-like corners, I remember how the wind blew over our
bivouacs, and how we burrowed like prairie dogs in the river bank, where
the battle with the storm had only one parallel in all this campaign.
That other battle comes later.

But with all and all we could live and laugh, and I still bless the men,
Reed and Hadley and John Mac and Pete, whose storm cave was near mine.
Without the loud, cheery laugh from their nest I should have died. But
nobody said "die." Troop A had the courage of its convictions and a
breezy sense of the ludicrous. I think I could turn back at Heaven's
gate to wait for the men who went across the Plains together in that
year of Indian warfare.

This is only one man's story. It is not an official report. The books of
history tell minutely how the scattered tribes submitted. Overw