It was a gloomy place, the battlefield that but a short time before had resounded with the war cry of the fierce Sioux and the rattle of carbines from the soldiers, and Guy was glad when they left it behind. Something kept telling him that he was going to see trouble before he came back, but he banished all such thoughts and had no place for them. His work lay in the expedition before him, and to that he gave the whole of his attention. In a short time the memory of the scene through which he had passed left him, and he was ready to join in with what the others had to propose, so long as it did not attract the attention of their commanding officer, Major Powell. So it is with soldiers the world over. A disastrous battle, during which so many of their old friends, perhaps their own tentmates, have gone to their long home, will depress their spirits for a time, and they welcome anything, no matter how trivial it is, that will draw their thoughts away to other matters and make them soldiers as they were before.
In due time they reached the site whereon the Sioux village had stood while they were engaged in the massacre, and where everything denoted that they had abandoned it with the utmost haste. Plunder of every sort which goes to make up the wealth of the Indian was scattered about, and beside the lodge poles, for the tents were gone, were the remains of half a dozen Indian ponies that had been sacrificed to go with their owners to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
"I don't understand the meaning of that," said Fred Bolton. "Did they kill their ponies on purpose?"
"Certainly," said Guy. "The Indian ponies have spirits as well as their masters; and when one is killed and his scalp not removed——"
"Do their scalps have anything to do with it?"
"Of course they do. If you scalp an Indian, his body becomes so much carrion which is not worthy of a burial; but if his friends can save the Indian without letting him fall into our hands, he is given all the rites that an Indian can think of. These ponies will go with him to the spirit land, and if we had time to hunt up the places where the owners are buried, we would find there their rifles, matches, scalping knives, and every other thing they need to go right to work."
Guy had many things to tell the newcomers, and during the two weeks that the expedition was out he had plenty of time around his camp fire at night to tell them all he knew about the hostile Indians. What he did not know the guides took up, and if the new men did not learn something about the Sioux before they got through, it was their own fault. They generally told some funny stories, but a wink from Guy told how much of them they had better believe.