een him?"

"No. I want to quit my job and go after him."

"Nonsense!" said Powell.

"You can't, Cutler," said Balwin. "I can't spare you."

"You'll be having to fill my place, then, I guess."

"You mean to go without permission?" said Powell, sternly.

"Lord, no! He'll shoot me. That's all."

The two lieutenants pondered.

"And it's to-day," continued Cutler, plaintively, "that he should be
gettin' hanged in Cheyenne."

Still the lieutenants pondered, while the wagon-master inspected a
photograph of Marie Rose as Marguerite.

"I have it!" exclaimed Powell. "Let's kill him."

"How about the commanding officer?"

"He'd back us--but we'll tell him afterwards. Cutler, can you find
Toussaint?"

"If I get the time."

"Very well, you're off duty till you do. Then report to me at once."

Just after guard-mounting two days later, Cutler came in without
knocking. Toussaint was found. He was down on the river now, beyond the
stockade. In ten minutes the wagon-master and the two lieutenants were
rattling down to the agency in an ambulance, behind four tall blue
government mules. These were handily driven by a seventeen-year-old boy
whom Balwin had picked up, liking his sterling American ways. He had
come West to be a cow-boy, but a chance of helping to impress Red Cloud
had seemed still dearer to his heart. They drew up at the agency store,
and all went in, leaving the boy nearly out of his mind with curiosity,
and pretending to be absorbed with the reins. Presently they came out,
Balwin with field-glasses.

"Now," said he, "where?"

"You see the stockade, sir?"

"Well?" said Powell, sticking his chin on Cutler's shoulder to look
along his arm as he pouted. But the scout proposed to be deliberate.

"Now the gate of the stockade is this way, ain't it?"

"Well, well?"

"You start there and follow the fence to the corner--the left corner,
towards the river. Then you follow the side that's nearest the river
down to the other corner. Now that corner is about a hundred yards from
the bank. You take a bee-line to the bank and go down stream, maybe
thirty yards. No; it'll be forty yards, I guess. There's a lone
pine-tree right agin the edge." The wagon-master stopped.

"I see all that," said Lieutenant Balwin, screwing the field-glasses.
"There's a buck and a squaw lying under the tree."

"Naw, sir," drawled Cutler, "that ain't no buck. That's him lying in his
Injun blanket and chinnin' a squaw."

"Why, that