HOW BRYANT WAS CAPTURED.
Reveille was sounded the next morning by Corporal Owens, who, having no drum or bugle at his command, sprang up at daylight and aroused his slumbering companions by shouting out the order, "Catch up!" More from the force of habit than anything else, he called the roll while he was bundling up the blankets on which he and George had slept, and, making the sergeant's salute to an imaginary officer, he announced: "All present or accounted for." Then Carey was ordered to boil the coffee, and Bob and the three troopers who were off duty went out to groom the horses. Having brought no brushes or currycombs with them, they were obliged to content themselves with rubbing the animals down with handfuls of grass; but they "went through the motions," as Bob expressed it, and that was all the most exacting officer could have expected of them under the circumstances.
As soon as breakfast had been eaten the troopers and their prisoners set out on the return march, Bob and the new scout leading the way. Behind them came the deserters, guarded on each flank and in the rear by two cavalrymen. Their advance was necessarily slow, for the captives had travelled rapidly the day before in order to put a safe distance between themselves and the fort, and they were weary and footsore. Gus Robbins, especially, was nearly "done up." He was in a worse condition than Talbot was, for the latter seemed to have slept off the effects of his wound. George felt the greatest compassion for Gus, and offered to lend him his horse; but Bob, who had grown somewhat hardened to suffering during his experience in the army, positively forbade it.
"It wouldn't do, George," said he, looking admiringly at his friend's sleek, well-conditioned animal, which was constantly champing his bit and tossing his head as if he were growing impatient at the slow progress they were making. "Gus would make a break for liberty sure, and as that nag of yours is able to distance anything in my party, I'd have to—" Here Bob tapped his carbine significantly. "That's something I don't want to do. Gus isn't so nearly exhausted as he seems to be. He is more distressed in mind than he is in body, for he is thinking of the prison at Fort Leavenworth. After we have gone a few miles we will rest them by taking them up behind us, but it wouldn't be a very bright trick to give one of them a horse to himself."
About eleven o'clock a halt was ordered, and the deserters, who were riding behind the troopers, having dismounted, Corporal Owens took Carey off on one side and gave him some very emphatic instructions. Then he and George also dismounted, and, leaving their horses behind, made their way cautiously toward a ridge a short distance in advance of them. As they neared the top they threw themselves on their hands and knees and crept up until they could look over it. They were in plain view of the squatter's cabin at which the troopers had stopped to eat their dinner the day before. Bob took just one look at it, and then hastily backed down the ridge again.
"Did you see that fellow chopping wood in front of the shanty?" said he, addressing himself to George. "That's the man I am looking for."
"Am I sure that I have a pair of good eyes?" asked Bob in reply. "Of course I am. I recognized him in spite of his citizen's clothes. That squatter has rigged him out in some of his own duds, but they'll not save him if I can manage in some way to get between him and the cabin."
"Perhaps, in order to make 'assurance doubly sure,' you had better take my field-glass and have another look at him," said George. "A false move might prove fatal to you, for it would show the squatter that you suspect him of harboring one of your men, and that would put both him and the deserter on their guard. But if that is your man, I am sorry for it."
"Why are you?" demanded Bob, looking at his companion in great surprise.