he Texas Panhandle, where the land
rises to a divide between Gageby's Creek and the Washita River, the
five survivors dug his grave with butcher-knives. They pulled down the
banks of a buffalo wallow over his body in the darkness of the night;
and they left him in this shallow sepulcher, unmarked by stone or
headboard. There his bones lie to this day, and no man knows when he
is passing over them.

The six of them had left General Miles's command two days before. At
dawn on September 13, they were riding northward up the long open
slope: Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman, two buffalo hunters serving as
scouts, and the four troopers, Sergeant Z. T. Woodhull, Privates Peter
Rath, John Harrington, and George W. Smith. You could hardly tell the
soldiers from the plainsmen, had you seen them; a sombreroed group,
booted to the knees and in their shirt-sleeves; all bore the heavy,
fifty-caliber Sharp's single-shot rifles across their saddle-horns.

The bare land rolled away and away, dark velvet-brown toward the
flushing east. The sky was vivid crimson when they turned their horses
up a little knoll. They reached its summit just as the sun was rising.
Here they drew rein. Two hundred Comanches and Kiowas were riding
toward them at the bottom of the hill; the landscape had tricked them
into ambush.

There passed an instant during which astonishment held both parties
motionless: the white men on the crest, unshaven, sunburned, their
soiled sombreros drooping over their narrowed eyes; and at the slope's
foot the ranks of half-naked braves all decked out in the war-path's
gaudy panoply. Their lean torsos gleamed under the rays of the rising
sun like old copper; patches of ocher and vermilion stood out in vivid
contrast against the dusky skins; feathered war-bonnets and dyed
scalp-locks fluttered, gay bits of color in the morning breeze. The
instant passed; the white men flung themselves from their saddles; the
red men deployed forming a wide circle about them. A ululating yell,
so fierce in its exultation that the cavalry horses pulled back upon
their bridles in a frenzy of fear, broke the silence. Then the booming
of the long Sharp's fifties on the summit mingled with the rattle of
Springfields and needle-guns on the hill's flank.

Now, while the bullets threw the dust from the dry sod into their
faces, five of the six dropped on their bellies in a ring. And by
the sergeant's orders Private George Smith took charge of the
panic-s