Storyteller.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 6, 6 May 1893, Page 13

Storyteller.

HIS FIRST MAN

The train that had borne the regiment up fr’Om the South was sidetracked in very quarters, with a cattle train on one side and a high board fence on the other. It was their second day there, and the place between the tracks on the left and the fence on the right was beginning to take on the ' peculiar offensiveness of a camp of men when the camp is avowedly temporary. It was during the last-ramoved Indian outbreak, and four troops of the Seventh Cavalry, ordered to the front, were lying over at Denver, awaiting the "rest of the regiment. The officers —those who were young enough to consider* such problem s ■ had long since exhausted every phase of the possibilities as to whether the}' would see a little actual service, or simply be half-frozen mounting guard on the Dakato prairies, and had given themselves up to stolid indifference and tobacco. “ I’ll be hanged if I Avas ever in a tighter place ! Reminds me of a night X spent out here on the Platte, though, before I went into the service,” the Captain of Troop E remarked, as he languidly watched the awkward towheaded squad turning out for the rather supererogatory task of relieving the guard. Young Mr Shortridge, who w'as from the point, and had lately joined his regiment, whipped a bit of cigar ashes off the front of his blouse with his handkerchief, and focussed the captain in a look that wondered what wox’th remembering could have happened to any one before he w r ent into the service. *'■ It w'as back in the ’6o’s, when I killed my only man,” the Captain of Troop E went on, as the line in faded blue and yellow broke into twos and swung off, the light on the bugler’s trumpet across his shoulder shifting brightly from mouth-piece to bell, as he stepped off at the head of the column, bent on the momentous duty of relieving the guard. “It was just after the first gold excitement here. I had come out with the rest. There had been an Indian outbreak ; a settlement or tw r o had been wiped out, a few emigrants killed, and three troops of the Sixth had been sent dow r n from old Fort Laramie to put a stop to the business. I remember, it aa'U.s beastly hot. I had fallen in with the regiment, with the rest of the stragglers, and we had made 40 miles that day —forty of the most infernal miles that any one ever rode over. “ We had camped the night before without water. Our canteens were dry, yet no one was so thirsty that he cared to leave the main column to look for water, for fear of having his thirst quenched with hot lead. Somehow' the line of march of the main column didn’t seem to lead to w r ater. Once w'e came to an old Avatercourse, the bed of it as dry and baked as an adobe wall. Sometines, as we galloped up with the front files, the hot air would come full in our faces, smelling of ooze and w ater-reeds, till w r e were sure there must be a spring or at least a buffalo wallow just beyond, but the nearest approach we found to water that day was a hollow r ed-out ravine or two, filled with sunflow'ers standing in the cracked soil that looked like stiffened aligator leather. There was nothing anywhere but bunch grass and cactus. “Well, that lasted till toAvard night. Then we came to where the settlement had been in, a little draw, up from the river. There lay the bones of the oxen and the others, huddled together. “ A rusty-loiokng buzzard got up from the bone-heap as w r e rushed by into the river up to our horses’ dustcaked shoulder-blades. “But there were other things to think of besides water, though the officers had to beat us back from it with the flat of their sabres. “ On a rise just beyond the bones was an old log cabin, or rather series of cabins, with dirt roofs, which for

some reason, the Indians Had loft unburned. We thought we knew why afterwards. . , . , “The Colonel decided to stable all the horses there ; for though we had not seen an Indian that day, we knew they were watching us and feared a stampede. “That done fox', and our hardtackand coffee with it, the guard was doubled, and orders issued that no one should go near the cabins under airy pretext, for fear some one might leave a door open. Our horses once gone, the Indians could have penned us in axxd picked us off at their leisure, or starved us off, for that matter, and saved their ammunition. “ The men Avent into camp a hundred or more yards away,down by the river*. “I, with an Indian scout, was stationed to re-inforce the guard on a knoll 'commanding the barred door of the stockade. We might incidentally have furnished a fine taxget there against the sky for some beggarly Sioux, so we set to w;ox'k with our knives, and with a prairie-dog hole as a basis, hollowed out a pit large enough to hold' xxs if we doubled up enough. As we lay there the breeze sprang up from the mountains cool and fresh, bxinging the thought of snow-drifts into that beastly hole. “ But it was light there. An Indian smeared with a stratum of red and yellow ochre, which rather retards perspiration, is not an agreeable subject, even with some of puxifying atmosphere around him. But in that hole ! “ Then, to make it worse, the hoi-ses of the settlement had evidently beexx corralled there, and the refuse and straw we lay in, in the damp night air from the liver, was very like what we have here now. “ But we lay still enough while a groggy-looking* moon came up and turned everything dark along the ridge. Between us and the stockade it was impossible to see anything. Half a regiment could have crawled up that draw and we never seen them. “ Suddenly, as w'e lay there trying to fit our elbows into the angles of that hole, a light flashed out over the rise, and someone whistling and swinging a lantern Avalked leisurely toward the stockade door. He made a devilish noise about it. “ I’m afraid that ragged heap of bones over the hill and the grave-like hole Ave Avere in had unnerwed me a trifle. AnyhoAV I thought I had never heard anything so cheering and homelike as that Avhistling. It made me think of times Avhen I used to go out to the barn at night Avhen I Avas a kid; it was so boyish and aAvkAvard. “ ‘lt’s some boy afraid of the dark,’ I Avhispered.” “My companion grunted, ‘Yes; lnjun.no AA'hustle.” “ That Avas so ; they never do. “‘But what is the young fool doing there, disobeying orders P I believe I’ll scare him a bit,’ I Avhispered; and Avith that I Avhipped up my rifle and fired at random over my head “ The light dropped, arid avc heard a scurrying of feet in the dead grass, which Avas taken up and prolonged in the camp, as the men staggered out of their sleep, with a rattle of steel scabbards on boot legs, cursing and stumbling over each other in the darkness. “When the excitement Avas all over, and the men that had got up cursing because there was an attack, had throAvn themselves doAvn again cursing because there was none, my companion spoke. ‘Good shot; break urn light,’ he said, and squatted down in his hole again. “ There was no more disturbance that night. “ Iri the morning they found an Indian in his Avar paint dead, at the stockade door. He Avas tall, very tall, as he lay on his face in a black pool of blood Avhere he fell, a shattered lantern in his right hand, and his head-dress of eagle’s feathers thrown far forward. “ Someone turned him over, and showe Avhered the bullet had torn a ragged hole in his throat. “ There was almost a smile on his painted stiffened lips.

“‘Qgaliala: big, chief , Sioux,’ said my companion of the night. He was a Sioux himself. Further comment was unnecessary, perhaps unwise. “ But the mystery of that boyish whistling w;as explained. “ Clever, wasn’t it ? . “ The Colonel swore himself hoarse about what might have happened, and insisted that 1 ought to be in the service ; and here I am, confound him! “ I cut one of the silver ear-rings from the dead chief’s head, and have kept it ever since. See! Looks as though it must have been hammered from an old silver dollar, and that crescent cut out somehow.” —Harper’s Weekly.