s to do
is surrender and become the recipient of more attention and the victim
of higher living than he ever dreamed of until he tried it, and found it
so pleasant that it paid him to go on the war-path every spring, to have
a royal old revel in blood and bestiality until fall, and then yield to
the blandishments of civilization for the winter. But to officer or
soldier capture means death, and death by fiendish torture as a rule.
The Indian fights for the glory and distinction it gives him. He has
everything to gain and nothing to lose. The soldier of the United States
fights the red man only because he is ordered to. He has nothing to
gain--even glory, for the Senate has fixed a bar sinister on gallantry
in Indian warfare. He has everything to lose. However, no words of mine
will ever effect a change of political heart in such matters. The fact
remains that the one thing left for Wayne to do--finding himself cut off
by some two hundred Cheyennes--was to take to the timber and stand them
off.

By this time the fray was spirited and picturesque in the extreme. The
whole line of bluffs was alive with Indians dashing to and fro,
occasionally swooping down as though to burst through or over the
slender skirmish line. Others had swung clear around to the left, and
were circling about in the valley below them. From all but the north
side, therefore, the bullets came whistling in, and occasionally some
stricken horse would plunge and snort madly, and one or two men were
being assisted to the bank of the stream, where the young doctor had
already gone to work. Hunter's dismounted men, sturdily fronting the
south and southeast, were holding five times their force in check, while
Ray's and Dana's mounted skirmishers, fronting southwest and west, were
slowly falling back fighting. The Cheyennes encircled them on every side
but the north.

Busy in getting his horses into shelter under the bank, which was a few
feet high, and directing where the provisions and pack-mules should be
placed, Wayne was suddenly accosted by Ray.

"If twenty men can be spared, sir, I'll put them on that island,"
pointing to a clump of willows and cottonwoods that stood along the
opposite shore. "The Indians are crossing above and below, and we'll
soon have their fire on our backs."

Wayne was soldier enough to see the force of the suggestion. He was man
enough, too, to want to ask Ray's pardon for his language of the
morning, but there was only time