itting in at a
poker game in Deadwood. He died drawing his two guns, and the whole
West mourned his passing. It had never known a braver spirit.

The silent ranks grow thicker: young men, sunburned and booted for the
saddle; the restless souls who forsook tame Eastern farm-lands, lured
by the West's promise of adventure, and received the supreme
fulfilment of that promise; the finest of the South's manhood drawn
toward the setting sun to seek new homes. They come from a hundred
boot-hills, from hundreds of solitary graves; from the banks of the
Yellowstone, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the two forks of the
Canadian.

There are so many among them who died exalted that the tongue would
weary reciting the tales. This tattered group were with the fifty who
drove off fifteen hundred Cheyennes and Kiowas on Beecher Island. The
Battle of the Arickaree was the name men gave the stand; and the
sands of the north fork of the Republican were red with the blood of
the Indians slain by Forsythe and his half hundred when night fell.

These three who follow in boots, jean breeches, and Oregon shirts are
Billy Tyler and the Shadler brothers, members of that company of
twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the big fight at Adobe Walls.
The sun was just rising when Quanah Parker, Little Robe, and White
Shield led more than eight hundred Comanches and Kiowas in the first
charge upon the four buildings which stood at the edge of the Llano
Estacado, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. The
Shadler boys were slain in their wagon at that onslaught. Tyler was
shot down at midday as he ventured forth from Myers & Leonard's store.
Before the afternoon was over the Indians sickened of their losses and
drew off beyond range of the big-caliber Sharp's rifles. They
massacred one hundred and ninety people during their three months'
raiding but the handful behind the barricaded doors and windows was
too much for them.

Private George W. Smith of the Sixth Cavalry is passing now. You would
need to look a second time to notice that he was a soldier, for the
rifle under his arm is a long-barreled Sharp's single shot and he has
put aside much of the old blue uniform for the ordinary Western
raiment. That was the way of scouting expeditions, and he, with his
five companions, was on the road from McClellan's Creek to Fort Supply
when they met two hundred Indians on that September morning of 1874.

Up near the northeast corner of t