This sounded very good, for the whites; but everybody knew that the Black Kettle band had no business going out to fight the Pawnees or anybody else. If they didn’t find the Pawnees, then they might try to fight whomever they met.
Away they rode, in their war-paint; and next, dreadful tidings came back. First, into Fort Harker were brought by their husbands two white women; almost crazed the men related that a party of Cheyennes had entered their ranch house, on the Saline River north of Harker, and after being kindly treated to hot coffee and sugar, had thrown the coffee in the women’s faces, knocked the men down, and abused all terribly. Two other white men had been killed in the fields with clubs; a woman had been killed, and two children had been carried away.
This was the news, to Hays from Fort Harker. From Fort Wallace, in the other direction, came word as shocking. Boyish Scout Will Comstock had been murdered by friendly Chief Turkey Leg’s Cheyennes; Sharpe Grover, his companion, had been desperately wounded.
Some of the young Cheyennes had tried to trade with Comstock for his prized revolver. But he would not trade. It was the same revolver that he promised to give to General Custer as soon as he had guided the general to a victory. The young Indians then rode with him and Grover to escort them from the village. Presently they dropped behind, did the Indians, shot Will Comstock dead, through the back, and almost killed Grover. But from shelter of his chum’s body, with his long-range rifle Grover fought all day. During the night and the next day he hid in a ravine; and through the ensuing darkness he crawled and staggered clear to Fort Wallace, where he gasped out the tale.
Aye, the buffalo had not turned southward, but already were Fort Hays and the other white stations of the southwest hearing from the guns and pistols issued at Fort Larned. From the Smoky Hill stage route and that of the Santa Fé, from the Republican, the Saline, the Arkansas and the Cimarron, at last along the telegraph line passed report after report, brought in by settler and scout and courier, telling of onslaught by Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche. The town of Sheridan, at the end of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, only fifteen miles from Fort Wallace, announced that it had been attacked and for two days kept in a state of siege!
Settlers and scouts and other frontiersmen began to pour into Fort Hays and Hays City; and here arrived General Sheridan himself—the small-bodied, large-headed, bristly little Irishman, with fire in his gray eyes.
“This is war,” Ned heard him repeat. “We’ll fight them to a finish. The only way to control them is to destroy them wherever they are to be found, until they all are confined on a reservation.”
Buffalo Bill Cody had been assigned to the quartermaster department with station at Fort Larned. Now one day he came riding posthaste into Hays, his horse matted with sweaty dust, he as dusty and as tired. He bore dispatches, and reported that all his route of seventy miles had been infested with hostile warriors.
He volunteered to return at once over the same route, with dispatches for Fort Dodge, thirty miles further. Back he rode; and in two more days he was at Hays again. He had ridden 350 miles in fifty-five hours. He stayed at Fort Hays, for General Sheridan promoted him to be Chief of Scouts for the Fifth Cavalry.
Buffalo Bill’s last dispatches told that the old men and squaws left in the villages were packing the tipis and were moving south, as if the Indians did not intend to winter on any reservation. Evidently the winter villages were to be set up where the soldiers could not follow.