and burned them."

Meantime, Mr. Davies had slowly mounted and was urging his reluctant
horse into some semblance of a canter. As the slope in front of him
steepened, however, both horse and rider abandoned the effort, and,
full fifty yards below the point where the battalion commander and his
scouts were in consultation, the lieutenant dismounted, and leaving his
steed unguarded to nibble at a patch of scant and sodden herbage that
had survived the Indian fires, he slowly climbed the ascent. "I am
ordered to report to you, sir," was all he had to say.

The major lowered his field-glass and looked back over a broad, burly
shoulder garbed in canvas shooting-jacket. Not a stitch of uniform
graced his massive person from head to heel, yet soldier was manifest in
every gesture or attitude. A keen observer might have said that a shade
of disappointment crossed his fine, full-bearded face as he heard the
subaltern's voice, but no sign of it appeared in his tone when he spoke.

"Mr. Davies, just take this glass and see what you make of that smoke
off yonder. The sun is getting low and it baffles me somewhat." Silently
the lieutenant obeyed, and creeping up towards the crest he knelt and
took a preliminary peep.

Issuing from the Bad Lands the jaded column had been plodding all day
long, though with frequent enforced rests, through a rolling sea of
barren, turfless earth. What grass had carpeted its surface in the
spring had been burned off by sagacious Indians, bent on impeding by
every known device the march of troops through their lands,--and what
device the Indian does not know is little worth knowing. Under a
dripping leaden sky the earth lay desolate and repulsive. Miles away to
the north the dim, castellated buttes and pinnacles of the range were
still faintly visible, and the tortuous trail of the column of twos
winding its way over wave after wave of barren prairie like the wake of
some terrestrial bark in a sea of mud. Far to the westward a jagged line
of hills, sharply defined, seemed to rear their crests from the general
level of the land, and somewhere along the eastern slope of that ridge,
and not far from where two twin-pointed buttes seemed peeping over at
these uncouth invaders, the main command of the expedition should have
passed earlier in the day, making for the crossing of the swift-running
stream that circled the northern border of some black, forbidding
heights lying like a dark patch upon the landsc