“Go and enchant Colonel Post,” said the general, without taking his field-glass from his eyes, “and tell him to pitch in as soon as he hears Smith’s guns.”
All laughed. But to-day I laugh alone. I am the Sole Survivor.
It would be easy to fill many pages with instances of Sole Survival, from my own experience. I could mention extinct groups composed wholly (myself excepted) of the opposing sex, all of whom, with the same exception, have long ceased their opposition, their warfare accomplished, their pretty noses blue and chill under the daisies. They were good girls, too, mostly, Heaven rest them! There were Maud and Lizzie and Nanette (ah, Nanette, indeed; she is the deadest of the whole bright band) and Emeline and—but really this is not discreet; one should not survive and tell.
The flame of a camp-fire stands up tall and straight toward the black sky. We feed it constantly with sage brush. A circling wall of darkness closes us in; but turn your back to the fire and walk a little away and you shall see the serrated summit-line of snow-capped mountains, ghastly cold in the moonlight. They are in all directions; everywhere they efface the great gold stars near the horizon, leaving the little green ones of the mid-heaven trembling viciously, as bleak as steel. At irregular intervals we hear the distant howling of a wolf—now on this side and again on that. We check our talk to listen; we cast quick glances toward our weapons, our saddles, our picketed horses: the wolves may be of the variety known as Sioux, and there are but four of us.
“What would you do, Jim,” said Hazen, “if we were surrounded by Indians?”
Jim Beckwourth was our guide—a life-long frontiersman, an old man “beated and chopped with tanned antiquity.” He had at one time been a chief of the Crows.
“I’d spit on that fire,” said Jim Beckwourth.
The old man has gone, I hope, where there is no fire to be quenched. And Hazen, and the chap with whom I shared my blanket that winter night on the plains—both gone. One might suppose that I would feel something of the natural exultation of a Sole Survivor; but as Byron found that
our thoughts take wildest flight