ble sooner or later. I'm more worried about that than
over the campaign news. Sorry about H----, of course, though I'd never
met him: They say he is a capital officer; but I can't start to-morrow
and have this thing haunting me all the way up to Laramie. I'll go down
to camp and hunt up Wilkins, and ask him flat-footed for his whole
story; then there will be time to write to Ray, or telegraph if need
be."

That was a dreary night at Russell. All the afternoon the telegraph
instrument at headquarters was clicking away with details of the brief
and sudden fight upon the Rosebud, and the officers read in silence the
description of the hordes upon hordes of savages that swooped down upon
Crook's little column, and whirled his allied Absarakas and Shoshones
off the wooded bluffs. "They must have been reinforced from every
reservation between the Missouri and the mountains," was the comment,
for the whole country swarmed with them. Scout after scout had been sent
out to strive to push through to the Yellowstone and communicate with
General Terry's forces, known to be concentrated at the mouth of the
Tongue. Some had come back, chased in to the very guard by yelling
"hostiles." Several had failed to return at all, but--significant
fact--none had succeeded in getting through. The last of June would soon
be at hand; the forces that were to co-operate--Crook's from the Big
Horn foot-hills at the south, Terry's from the banks of the Yellowstone
at the north--had reached their appointed stations and even gone beyond,
but not a vestige of communication could they establish one with the
other. Crook, striving to force his way through from his corrals and
camps, had been overpowered and thrust back by the concentration upon
him of five times his weight in foes. Terry, sending his cavalry
scouting up the Rosebud, found an unimpeded passage for miles and miles;
and even as our friends at Russell were reading with gloomy faces the
tidings from the front, a little battalion of cavalry, pushing
venturously up the wild and picturesque valley, came suddenly upon a
sight that bade their leader pause.

Up from among the wild rose-bushes along the sparkling stream, and
climbing the great "divide" to the west, there ran a broad, new-beaten,
dusty trail, pounded by the hoofs of ten thousand ponies, strewn on
every side with abandoned lodge-poles, worn-out blankets, or other
_impedimenta_, malodorous, unsightly. "The Indians have crossed to the