Illustrations
- [“Come out, you white men, and fight!”]
- [With his right hand he raised the man’s head above the current.]
- [“Walking is good, on you can ride on a log, the water is fine.”]
- [The two men bought a boat of the trader.]
- [“It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka murmured.]
- [“Take him out of our lines to that open field.”]
CHAPTER I—ON BOARD THE FANNY HARRIS
There came through the night loud crashing and rumbling sounds, and a confusion of men’s voices from the steep road leading down from Fort Ridgely to the boat-landing on the Minnesota River.
All afternoon, big William Ferguson and his ten-year-old brother, Timothy, had watched the six-mule teams of the United States Army trot down the steep narrow road with guns, caissons and army supplies, for Colonel Pemberton had been ordered to leave the Sioux frontier in Minnesota and rush his battery and men to Washington as fast as possible. Fort Sumter had been fired on. President Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers, and from north and west, the scattered detachments and batteries of the regular army were rushed to Washington. The long-threatened Civil War had begun.
But in those days, Minnesota was a long way from the Atlantic coast, for the railroads had only just touched the Mississippi River. The soldiers at Fort Ridgely had to travel five hundred miles by steamboat to La Crosse, and in order to make all possible haste, they continued by torchlight the loading of guns, caissons, ammunition, horses, and stores.
It was the liveliest day little Tim Ferguson and his big brother, Bill, had ever seen. Bill had at last gone to sleep, wrapped in his blanket, with his head resting on a coil of rope, but the active Tim had never tired of watching the soldiers loading the big guns, and the carpenters and engineers repairing the boat for the fast and dangerous downriver trip on the flooded, winding Minnesota.
When the crash of timbers and the shouts of men rang through the night, he shook his sleeping brother, calling:
“Get up, Bill, get up! A mule team has rolled down the bluffs; I told you they would. Come along, Bill!”
Tim had guessed right. Among the trees lay the wagon and mules, while boxes of shells and hard-tack were scattered through the brush. Had it not been for the trees and brush, men, mules and wagon would have rolled straight into the swollen river.