's tent. They were safe.

Lieutenant Hallowell could not stand up. Was he fatally hurt?

"What is it, Hallowell, old fellow?"

"I dunno. Can't move only so far."

"No wonder! It's your coat-tails, man!"

The tails of his overcoat had worked outside and were pinned fast to
the wagon box by four arrows. He could not use his right arm, either.
The steady threshing with the whip had almost paralyzed it.

He was helped into the surgeon's office. His right hand was badly
torn, and the wound in his back serious. Captain Booth watched the
wounds being dressed; didn't feel very comfortable, himself, somehow.

"What makes you shrug your shoulders so, captain?"

"I don't know. There's a curious smarting."

"I should say there was! Why, you're wearing an arrow-head, man!"

So he was. When he had wrenched free from the wagon-sheet cover he had
taken an arrow-head with him. It had to be cut out.

They both got well. Twenty-two arrows were found in the wagon box; the
whole vehicle was a sight! As for the plucky little mules, they never
amounted to much for service, after that, but they managed to hobble
around in their pasture and enjoy their reward as veterans, on a
pension of the best grass and water.

[1] See "Boys' Book of Indian Warriors."

CHAPTER XIX

RELIEF FOR BEECHER'S ISLAND (1868)

AND A RATTLE-SNAKE IN THE WAY

The Plains Indians--the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Kiowas,
the Comanches--had fought hard, during the war of the white men in the
East, to clear their hunting grounds; but when in 1866 the Civil War
had ended they found that the Americans were pressing forward more
strongly than ever.

Two iron roads were being surveyed through the buffalo country; new
gold fields, in Montana, were being opened and a white man's
wagon-road, protected by forts, was being laid out to reach them by a
short cut through Wyoming.

With two thousand of his Oglala Sioux, Chief Red Cloud undertook to
close this wagon-road; and close it he did. He beleaguered new Fort
Phil Kearney in northern Wyoming, wiped out one detachment of
eighty-one men, attacked other detachments, cut off the supplies from
all the forts, stood firmly in the path; and in 1868 the United States
Government agreed to withdraw all soldiers and leave the country to the
Sioux.[1]

But the iron trails continued. There were the Union Pacific in the
north, the Kansas Pacific on the south. The first drove its stakes