d
them straggled a thousand soldiers. And still the March days dragged on.

Then the trails began to tell us that the Indians were gathering in
larger groups and the command was urged forward with more persistent
purpose. We slept at night without covering under the open sky. We
hardly dared to light fires. We had nothing to cook, and a fire would
reveal our whereabouts to the Indians we were pursuing. A thousand
soldiers is a large number; but even a thousand men, starving day after
day, taxing nerve and muscle, with all the reserve force of the body
feeding on its own unfed store of energy; a thousand men destitute of
supplies, cut off by leagues of desert sands from any base of
reinforcement, might put up only a weak defence against the hundreds of
savages in their own habitat. It was to prevent another Arickaree that
Custer's forces kept step in straggling lines when rations had become
only a taunting mockery of the memory.

The map of that campaign is kept in the archives of war and its official
tale is all told there, told as the commander saw it. I can tell it here
only as a private down in the ranks.

In the middle of a March afternoon, as we were silently swinging forward
over the level Plains, a low range of hills loomed up. Beyond them lay
the valley of the Sweetwater, a tributary of the Canadian River. Here,
secure in its tepees, was the Cheyenne village, its inhabitants never
dreaming of the white man's patience and endurance. Fifteen hundred
strong it numbered, arrogant, cunning, murderous. The sudden appearance
of our army of skeleton men was not without its effect on the savage
mind. Men who had crossed the Staked Plains in this winter time, men who
looked like death already, such men might be hard to kill. But lying and
trickery still availed.

There was only one mind in the file that day. We had come so far, we had
suffered such horrors on the way, these men had been guilty of such
atrocious crimes, we longed fiercely now to annihilate this band of
wretches in punishment due for all it had cost the nation. I thought of
the young mother and her baby boy on the frozen earth between the drifts
of snow about Satanta's tepee on the banks of the Washita, as Bud and I
found her on the December day when we searched over Custer's battle
field. I pictured the still forms lying on their blankets, and the long
line of soldiers passing reverently by, to see if by chance she might be
known to any of us--this wom