hose merry quips and jests and boundless
distortions of fact or fancy are the joy of the regiment. With Blake
one always finds Merrill and Freeman and some of the jovial junior
captains, and, of course, the boys,--Hunter, Dana, Briggs; and here they
are on this blessed Sabbath of the Centennial June, sent up to stop Mr.
----'s cartridges, _after_ they have become the property of "Mr. Lo;"
and once a cartridge becomes Indian property, there is only one way of
stopping it. The wealth of France is inadequate to purchase of Alfred
Krupp a single gun from his shops at Essen, because his love for
Fatherland will not let him place a power in the hands of the hereditary
enemy. It takes enlightened England and free America to supply friends
and foes alike with the means to kill.

Stannard closes his glass with a grunt of dissatisfaction, and turns to
Billings. "None of those cartridges get through here _this_ day anyhow;
but how many do you suppose Mr. ---- has sent up there already?" And he
points as he speaks to the far northwest.

Under that blue dome, cloudless, glaring; under the sentinel peaks of
the Big Horn shimmering there in the distance, over the rolling divide
in that glorious upland that heaves and rolls and tosses between the
Rosebud and the swirling stream in the broad valley farther west,
another regiment--that of which we spoke, whose leader is famed in song
and story--is riding rapidly this still Sunday morning in search of Mr.
----'s cartridges. Some say the tall, blue-eyed, blond-bearded captain
who leads that beautiful troop of bays is Mr. ----'s brother. Odd! yet
how can the Indian Bureau know that Crazy Horse and Two Bears and
Kicking Mule want to buy Mr. ----'s bullets to kill his brother with?
How, indeed, should Mr. ---- know? Army officers, 'tis true, have
warned them time and again; but when were army officers' statements ever
potent in the Interior Department against the unendorsed assertion of
Crazy Horse or Kicking Mule that he only wanted to kill buffalo? Indeed,
is not Mr. ---- himself eager to go bail for the purchaser, since his
profits are so high? Over the divide, hot on the broad, beaten trail
goes the long column. How different are they from our sombre friends of
the --th, who, miles and marches away to the southeast, are dismounting
and unsaddling under the cottonwoods! Years in Arizona have robbed the
latter of all the old love for the pomp and panoply of war. There is not
a bit of finer