The Captain went down and said something to his men before he broke ranks, and it made them feel a great deal better for what they had done; but there was one thing that they never could blot from their minds. There was that battlefield, a mile long and half a mile wide, of which they had a plain view as they passed along the ridge, covered by the bodies of men whom they would never shake by the hand again, and the memory of it would disturb their sleep for many a night afterward. While this was going on and the Colonel sat listening to his speech, Amos Billings, the officer who Guy Preston had relieved in command of the tower, came up to the commander and saluted him.
"What is it, Billings?" said he. "I can't ask you to sit down, for there is no place."
"I don't want to stop, sir," he replied. "There are our boys alone in that tower—"
"And you want to go out and inform them that they are not forgotten by the garrison, do you? Well, go on. Take a cavalryman with you to hold your horse. Tell Guy that I would have answered his signal for re-enforcements, but Major Powell told me that I ought not to. Guy did his duty up to the handle."
This was what Billings wanted to tell Guy, while they were sitting there on the steps that led to the top of the tower.
CHAPTER XIV. In the Sioux Camp
At a late hour in the evening, or rather at an early hour in the morning of the day that preceded the battle of Fort Phil Kearney, all was silent and still in Red Cloud's camp, which was located a few miles from the stockade. The Indians had kept up their dancing and shouting until almost ready to drop with fatigue, pluming themselves on victories won in bygone days, and panting for new scalps to be added to those already gained, by the utter annihilation of the soldiers of the Fort. At last they went into their tepees to dream of the triumph which Red Cloud promised them should be theirs before many suns had passed away. The wiping away of the Fort and the utter cleaning out of all the power of the whites, was looked upon as a certain thing by the Sioux, and all they waited for was an opportunity to use the power which they were thought to possess. And why should not the whites be cleaned out? They had come into that country without an invitation, were spreading themselves all through it, and now they proposed to build a road through their best hunting ground, which meant the thinning out of the buffalo—their only means of subsistence. All they asked of the whites was to go away and let them alone; but it seemed that the more land the whites had, the more they wanted. No place was safe for the Indian. His limits were growing smaller and smaller every day, and very soon he would find that he had no land he could call his own. Something must be done if they thought to lay their bones among their fathers', and the only way to do it was to declare battle and go upon the warpath. This was what the Sioux tribe and some of the Cheyennes had proposed to do.
When Indians are settled in their winter camp, and so far away from enemies of every description that there is no danger of being assaulted by them, it is the noisiest place that can be found on earth. Their days are passed in loitering around the fire, but the evenings are given over to pleasure. It is then that the dancers and story-tellers are in their element, and the noise of the tom-tom drowns all other sounds, except the whooping and yelling. It had been so in this camp until the day that the renegade chiefs, as Red Cloud called them, had signed a lease for that road; but the moment that happened, the winter camp had been changed into a war camp, and all the men in it were bent upon obtaining scalps and plunder. Then the social dancers and story-tellers were out of place, and no performance of any kind was indulged in except the scalp dance. The scalps were old, they had done duty over and over again, but that did not hinder them from being brought out whenever a warrior deemed it necessary. It happened so on this night, and the braves, having grown weary of telling what they meant to do when the soldiers came out to fight them, had passed into their lodges and gone to sleep.