the Sioux swarmed, scalping until they could scalp no
more. Behind them came thousands of women and boys, shouting
from excitement and the drunkenness of victory.

It was all incredible, unreal to Dick, some hideous nightmare
that would soon pass away when he awoke. Such a thing as this
could not be! Yet it was real, it was credible, he was awake and
he had seen it--he had seen it all from the moment that the
first trooper appeared in the valley until the last fell under
the overwhelming charge of the Sioux. He still heard, in the
waning afternoon, their joyous cries over their great victory,
and he saw their dusky forms as they rushed here and there over
the field in search of some new trophy.

Dick was not conscious of any physical feeling at all--neither
weariness, nor fear, nor thought of the future. It seemed to him
that the world had come to an end with the ending of the day.

The shadows thickened and advanced. The west was a sea of
dusk. The distant lodges of the village passed out of sight.
The battlefield itself became dim and it was only phantom
figures that roamed over it. All the while Dick was unnoticed,
forgotten in the great event, and as the night approached the
desire for freedom returned to him. He was again a physical being,
feeling pain, and from habit rather than hope he pulled once more
at the rawhide cords that held his wrists--he did not know that
he had been tugging at them nearly all afternoon.

He wrenched hard and the unbelievable happened. The rawhide,
strained upon so long, parted, and his hands fell to his side.
Dick slowly raised his right wrist to the level of his eyes and
looked at it, as if it belonged to another man. There was a red
and bleeding ring around it where the rawhide had cut deep,
making a scar that took a year in the fading, but his numbed
nerves still felt no pain.

He let the right wrist sink back and raised the left one. It had
the same red ring around it, and he looked at it curiously,
wonderingly. Then he let the left also drop to his side, while
he stood, back against the tree, looking vaguely at the dim
figures of the Sioux who roamed about in the late twilight still
in that hideous search for trophies.

It was while he was looking at the Sioux that an abrupt thought
came to Dick. Those were his own wrists at which he had been
looking. His hands were free! Why not escape in all this
turmoil and excitement, with the friendly and covering nig