“General Miles?” repeated Carl. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Why, I sent him notice that you had been captured by the Sioux band when they were not on the warpath, and requested him to demand your surrender.”
“This is the first I heard of it, sir,” said Carl, who wondered that the colonel thought so much of him as all that. “If he sent any word to the Sioux I don’t know it.”
The commander looked surprised but said nothing, and Carl went on with his report. He looked more surprised as he listened, asked a few questions to get at all Carl knew about the matter, and finally said:
“It serves him right. This Sioux war won’t amount to much.”
After a few moments’ conversation, during which Carl told him of the way he had escaped, he went out and found Lieutenant Parker waiting for him, who told him he would find everything he wanted to eat in the officers’ quarters, and that as soon as he had changed his clothes, and had taken the sharp edge off his appetite, he was expected to tell his story. Carl hurried away, and in half an hour more he was in Lieutenant Parker’s quarters, who was out somewhere, but when he came in a few moments later he found Carl filling up for a smoke.
“I tell you, Parker, my pipe was the only friend I had while I was posting along that prairie in the direction of the fort,” said he, as he pulled a match from his pocket and struck a light. “It could not say anything to me, but I drew almost as much encouragement from it as I would from my horse, if I had had one.”
The young scout then seated himself and went on with his story, omitting no detail that he thought would be at all interesting to Lieutenant Parker. When he told of the Ghost Dance, he held his excited auditor spellbound.
“It was the queerest thing in the shape of a dance that I ever heard of,” said Carl. “There was literally nothing that was interesting about it. They go round and round until they get tired, and then they drop.”
“Did you see anybody in a trance?” asked Parker.