his face, and, plain as on canvas thereon was portrayed war, carnage,
and the lust of battle.

"They're there; a hundred, if a single red!" he shouted. "Come on!" and
the rowels of his great spurs dug deep at his horse's flanks, dug until
the blood spurted.

But a few minutes it took to make the run, yet only a fraction of the
time that mounted swarm in the valley held their ground. Outnumbering
those who charged many times, it was not in savage nature to face that
unformed oncoming motley of howling, bloodthirsty maniacs. Slowly at
first began the retreat; then as, with great swiftness, the others
shortened the distance intervening, it became a contagion, a mania, a
stampede. Every brave for himself, stumbling, crowding through the
dismantled ruins of what had the day before been a settlement, howling
like their pursuers, seeking but one thing, escape, they headed for the
thicket surrounding the river bank; the whistle of bullets in their
ears, cutting at the vegetation about them. Into its friendly cover they
plunged, as a fish disappears beneath the surface of a lake, and were
swallowed from sight. That is, all but one. That one, unhorsed by
accident, was left to face that oncoming flood. . . . But why linger.
Like the charge itself, his fate is history. These men were but human,
and thick about them were the ashes from the roof-trees of their
friends.

Summer night, dreamy with caress of softest south wind, musical with the
drone of myriad crickets, with the boom of frogs from the low land
adjoining the river, melancholy with the call of the catbird, with the
infrequent note of the whip-poor-will, was upon the land of the Mandans
when the score and one, their dripping ponies once more dry, took up the