Fort Hays had improved. The log quarters were giving place to story and a half frame houses, painted. The town also had expanded. The coming of the railroad had made it grow greatly, although it was not any handsomer. It was a town without law except the law of rope and of pistol. Wild Bill Hickok with his two ivory-handled revolvers and his steely eyes and his quiet manner was the peace-maker; but in making peace men frequently were killed.
This was a scout headquarters. Constantly in and out, riding the trails, was Wild Bill; so was Will Comstock; so was California Joe and so was Pony Bill Cody. But they called him Pony Bill no longer. He was now Buffalo Bill. During the past fall he had been employed in supplying buffaloes to feed the laborers on the Kansas Pacific survey. By the amount of buffalo that he had shot he astonished everybody. In a friendly contest with Will Comstock he had killed sixty-nine to Comstock’s forty-six—and Comstock was one of the crack hunters of the plains.
There were several new scouts, too: Sharpe Grover and Jack Corbin and Dick Parr and Jack Stillwell and Bill Trudell; all good.
During the spring and summer the railroad pushed on westward. To the north the Sioux were quiet and satisfied, but in the south the Kiowas and Comanches and Arapahos and all demanded better terms, and guns and ammunition, ere they went upon their reservation. Scouts Comstock and Grover and Parr were employed especially to visit about among the tribes and explain matters and urge peace. Lieutenant Fred H. Beecher, a nephew of the great preacher Henry Ward Beecher of New York City, directed their movements.
This seemed like a very good scheme. For——
“In my opinion, gentlemen,” said in Ned’s hearing Wild Bill, “it’s worth a lot o’ trouble, and the Government can afford to give in on a few points, to keep those settlers from being murdered, who are out here with their families, trying hard to build up the country. If we can only hold those Injuns off till fall, after the buffalo season, and get ’em on their reservation for the winter, we can then watch ’em.”
From Fort Hays the Seventh Cavalry marched south, in early summer, to join with some of the Tenth Cavalry and the Third Infantry, along the Arkansas River near Fort Larned and Fort Dodge. The Indian villages were still in this vicinity, and the young men were restless and full of threats. General Alfred Sully, who had fought the Sioux in Dakota in 1863, was in command down here, over the District of the Arkansas.
Ned was retained on his quartermaster department detail; but he was growing eager to take the field with his comrades.
Affairs seemed to be shaping all right, until in July arrived at Fort Hays, by courier from Fort Larned, word that the warriors were leaving the villages, and trailing northward. Quickly following came the news that a party of Cheyennes had raided the friendly Kaws, or Kansas Indians, near Council Grove south of Riley, and had robbed settlers.