ay, just as the
young officer from some other hand

Receives but recks not of a wound,

and then troop-horse, pony, soldier, and savage are rolling in a
confused heap upon the turf. The Indian is the first on his feet and
limping away; no redskin willingly faces white man "steel to steel."
McLean staggers painfully to his knees, brushes dust and clods from his
blinded eyes with one quick dash of his sleeve, and draws a bead on his
red antagonist just as the latter turns to aim; there is a sudden flash
and report, and the Sioux throws up his hands with one yell and tumbles
headlong. Then a mist seems rising before the young soldier's eyes, the
earth begins to reel and swim and whirl, and then all grows dark, and
he, too, is prostrate on the sward.

VIII.

They were having an anxious day of it at Laramie. Early in the morning
a brace of ranchmen, still a-tremble from their experiences of the
night, made their way into the post and told gruesome stories of the
doings of the Indians at Eagle's Nest and beyond. The Cheyenne stage,
they said, was "jumped," the driver killed, and the load of passengers
burned alive in the vehicle itself. There might have been only fifty
warriors when they fought Lieutenant Blunt and his party in the Chug
Valley, but they must have been heavily re-enforced, for there were two
hundred of them at the least count when they swept down upon the little
party of heroes at the stage station. They fought them like tigers,
said the ranchmen, but they would probably have burned the building
over their heads and "roasted the whole outfit" had it not been that
the coming of the stage had diverted their attention. These were the
stories with which the two worthies had entertained the guard and other
early risers pending the appearance of the commanding officer; and
these were the stories that, in added horrors and embellishments,
spread throughout the garrison, through kitchen to breakfast-room, as
the little community began to make its appearance down-stairs. Major
Miller, a veteran on the frontier, had taken the measure of his
informants in a very brief interview. Aroused by the summons of
Lieutenant Hatton, to whom as officer of the day the guard had first
conducted these harbingers of woe, the major had shuffled down-stairs
in shooting-jacket and slippers, and cross-examined them in his
dining-room. Both men looked wistfully at the brimming decanter on his
sideboard, and one of them "all