“You with Major Hurd?” queried Terry.
“Yes. Chase Sioux; kill heap; many scalps. Take ’um Crow Creek, have big dance.”
“Why don’t you go back to the wagon train?” scolded George. “That’s where you belong. What are you out here chasing white men for?”
“No wagon train. Kill all Sioux, now bring scalps to soldier chief. Scare white boys, make ’em run. Hoo-rah!”
The Pawnees were in the highest kind of spirits. They seemed to think nothing of having left the wagon train in the lurch, but they thought a whole lot of their successful fight with the Sioux. Now they were going back to Crow Creek, or Cheyenne, to celebrate.
Taking the two dispatch-bearers, they laid a straight course—knew exactly where they were heading. And sure enough, from the crest of the next little rise Cheyenne was plain in sight, with the railroad grade running into its collection of tents and shacks and new buildings, and through and on east to meet end o’ track.
The first thing to do, of course, was to hustle the Major Hurd dispatch into the hands of the commanding officer at the new Fort Russell, which was as yet only a tent camp outside of town, and leave their Spencer carbines; then to look up General “Jack” Casement, and give him the General Dodge dispatches and report for duty; all before breakfast.
Scarcely had they reached town, from the fort, when a detachment of cavalry was trotting into the west, to relieve the Hurd wagon train. That was good. Now for General Casement.
“It’s shore some town,” George commented, as they ambled through, curiously inspecting.
And so it was, they were to find out: the “Magic City of the Plains,” with already over a thousand people, here where three months before there had been only a bare expanse, and a graveyard of two dead men; with streets named, and city officers in charge, and a daily paper, and shingled roofs as well as sheet-iron and canvas, and several two-story buildings, one of which, 55 × 25 feet, had been erected of raw rough lumber from Denver in forty-eight hours!