trees we gnawed upon. It was the hardest day of all the march.

Pete, who had pulled me back from the valley of the shadow the night
before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little
wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing became his Thanksgiving
turkey.

The second night was bitterly cold, and then came a third day of
struggling through deep snows on hilly prairies, and across
canyon-guarded bridgeless streams. The milestones of our way were the
poor bodies of our troop horses that had given up the struggle, while
their riders pushed resolutely forward.

On the fourth day out from Camp Starvation we came at sundown to the
edge of a low bluff, beyond which lay a fertile valley. If Paradise at
life's eventide shall look as good to me, it will be worth all the cares
of the journey to make an abundant entrance therein.

Out of the bitter cold and dreary snow fields, trackless and treeless,
whereon we had wandered starving and uncertain, we looked down on a
broad wooded valley sheltering everything within it. Two converging
streams glistening in the evening light lay like great bands of silver
down this valley's length. Below us gleamed the white tents of
Sheridan's garrison, while high above them the Stars and Stripes in
silent dignity floated lightly in the gentle breeze of sunset.

That night I slept under a snug tent on a soft bed of hay. And again I
dreamed as I had dreamed long ago of the two strange women whom I was
struggling to free from a great peril.

General Sheridan had expected the Kansas regiment to make the journey
from Fort Beecher on the Arkansas to his station on the Canadian River
in four or five days. Our detachment of five hundred men had covered it
in fourteen days, but we had done it on five days' rations, and three
days' forage. Small wonder that our fine horses had fallen by the way.
It is only the human organism backed by a soul, that can suffer and
endure.

Pliley and his fifty men who had left us the night we went into camp on
Sand Creek had reached Sheridan three days in advance of us, and already
relief was on its way to those whom we had left beyond the
snow-beleaguered canyons of the Cimarron. The whole of our regiment was
soon brought in and this part of the journey and its hardships became
but a memory. Official war reports account only for things done. No
record is kept of the cost of effort. The glory is all for the battle
lists of the killed or wounded,