n pounds first ten days, five
pounds next ten, and you're out of grain for the next ten. Is that the
way still?"

"Thet's the way, General, on these yere thirty-day affairs."

Through all this small-talk Crook had been inspecting the mules and the
horses on picket-line, and silently forming his conclusion. He now
returned to Captain Glynn and shared his mess-box.

They made Snake River. Crook knew better than Long what the animals
could do. And next day they crossed, again by starlight, turned for a
little way up the Owyhee, decided that E-egante had not gone that road,
trailed up the bluffs and ledges from the Snake Valley on to the barren
height of land, and made for the Malheur River, finding the eight hoofs
of two deer lying in a melted place where a fire had been. Mr. Dailey
had insisted that at least fifty Indians had drunk his liniment and
trifled with his cats. Indeed, at times during his talk with General
Crook the old gentleman had been sure there were a hundred. If this were
their trail which the command had now struck, there may possibly have
been eight. It was quite evident that the chief had not taken any three
hundred warriors upon that visit, if he had that number anywhere. So the
column went up the Malheur main stream through the sage-brush and the
gray weather (it was still cold, but no sun any more these last two
days), and, coming to the North Fork, turned up towards a spur of the
mountains and Castle Rock. The water ran smooth black between its edging
of ice, thick, white, and crusted like slabs of cocoanut candy, and
there in the hollow of a bend they came suddenly upon what they sought.

Stems of smoke, faint and blue, spindled up from a blurred acre of
willow thicket, dense, tall as two men, a netted brown and yellow mesh
of twigs and stiff wintry rods. Out from the level of their close,
nature-woven tops rose at distances the straight, slight blue
smoke-lines, marking each the position of some invisible lodge. The
whole acre was a bottom ploughed at some former time by a wash-out, and
the troops looked down on it from the edge of the higher ground, silent
in the quiet, gray afternoon, the empty sage-brush territory stretching
a short way to fluted hills that were white below and blackened with
pines above.

The General, taking a rough chance as he often did, sent ground scouts
forward and ordered a charge instantly, to catch the savages unready;
and the stiff rods snapped and tangled betwee