"Orderly, bring Mr. Finerty a hundred rounds of Troop E ammunition."
This sounded like business, to Reporter Finerty.
They all rode out at noon; made thirteen miles and camped to rest the horses for a night march. Scout Gruard thought that they would not have to go far to find Indians. Two or three nights before he and Big Bat had reconnoitered forward twenty miles and had seen several parties of Sioux, only that distance from the main camp. Evidently General Crook was being watched.
At sunset the little detachment started on. In the dusk Big Bat imagined that he caught sight of a mounted Indian spy surveying them from a shallow ravine. Frank Gruard dashed for the place; but the object disappeared and he discovered nothing.
"Might have been an Indian, but we think maybe only an elk," he said.
Anyway, the mystery was not very comforting. The column were forbidden to talk; they rode on, northward, through the long grass of the rich bottoms; the two scouts led, Scout Gruard every now and again halting, to scan about from the high points.
The full moon rose at eight o'clock, and the lonely land of sage and grass and willows and pines and rocks stretched silvery; on the west the snowy tips of the Big Horn Mountains glistened.
Nothing happened. About two o'clock in the morning Lieutenant Sibley ordered camp. They were forty miles from General Crook, and near ahead, over the next divide, lay the upper end of the Valley of the Little Big Horn in the Rosebud country.
"We will find the Sioux villages in there, all right," promised Frank Gruard. "And," he added again, "we won't have far to go, either."
Yes, that had been the place; but General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry already had found the villages, and the Sioux were on the outlook to keep back other soldiers while the villages moved elsewhere. Young Lieutenant Sibley and his thirty men were advancing into a hornets' nest.