On the long journey to the South, after the first hour, the leading ambulance vehicle never again was sighted. From day to day, from camp to camp, at one river crossing after another, the slower travelers found proof of attempts to make their progress as safe and easy as possible. There were rafts and boats, each left on the north bank of the stream. Fords were marked out with poles. What with the passing of Jesse Chisholm’s wagon trail to the Arbuckle Mountains, and the additional care of McMasters and the Army men, the passage southward, thus well equipped, was child’s play compared with the long and dangerous journey northbound with the herd. The lead ambulance easily did forty and fifty miles a day, the ox carts twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty.
Again and again Taisie Lockhart felt growing upon her her sense of indebtedness to a man with whom she could never come to terms. One thing seemed certain—they now had parted company forever. He was leaving Texas, going North to live. Bitterly the girl resolved that all material obligations between them, at least, should one day be discharged, though it should take her last dollar.
Not once on all the long journey did McMasters ever accost his prisoner. Cold as a tourmaline, his green-gray eyes looked Rudabaugh straight in the face when occasion came. But that was all. At night the prisoner had chance to sleep, no chance to escape. If McMasters himself caught a continuous hour or two of sleep, the boy Cinquo took his place, his weapon across his knee. Men fed Rudabaugh with no more ceremony than had he been a captive animal.
Thus, on one morning, two days’ march south of the Washita, McMasters and his men raised the rough highlands of Medicine Bluff Creek, where sat Camp Wichita which not long thereafter was to be known as Fort Sill, thanks to the earlier and long-forgotten efforts of that great soldier of the West, R. B. Marcy, captain of the Fifth Infantry; the first explorer for the Army in those parts, and a wise man in Indian matters in his day. He had predicted the savage campaign of two years later, of Sheridan, Custer, which proved needful to chastise the upper tribesmen, of Black Kettle, on the Washita.
As to the reservation which later was to hold the Comanches, subsequent to the series of tribal defeats wrought by Custer along the Washita, nothing was consummated until the following year. The main body of the Quahrada Comanches—those who had the Staked Plains as their hunting grounds—had traveled on back home. But here in the Wichita Mountains sturdy Sandy Griswold still held old Yellow Hand and his select band of warriors, waiting for word from north of the Arkansas. He had told Yellow Hand to wait until his young men came. Then they could go back home. And Yellow Hand himself was the first to announce the coming of men from the north.
The welcome between McMasters and Griswold was brief. The latter looked inside the ambulance.
“You’ve got your man!” said he grimly. “How about the others?”
“They resisted arrest, sir,” replied Dan McMasters. “I had the help of Wild Bill Hickok at Abilene. I have kept my word and brought in Rudabaugh for you. Here’s your man.”
“Get out, you!” He spoke to Rudabaugh the first time, and cut his bands.