A new campaign was inaugurated. Powder-face Hudson and three other hunters came in that evening from Quinn's. The Indians had not gone there, so they had their horses. Hudson hitched up his team the next morning, and the three men who were to go after the horses threw their saddles into the wagon. West told them to come into the store and get anything they wanted; after which the four of them started for the settlements near Griffin.
The party that took Sharp to the hospital returned the fourth day, bringing the big chestnut-sorrel horse that I rode in the fight on the 18th of March. They also brought a letter from Oleson, the Swede, who loaned him to me for the March expedition. He was my horse now. I wish I had his letter to reproduce here. The horse was given to me as a gracious gift from a man whom I had befriended and who had learned that I was afoot.
When I took him to Griffin after Lumpkins had shot him, we took all his camp outfit and stock along. I had put a new cover on his wagon; and got Mr. Jackson's permission to back the wagon against his barn in the corral; and had taken Oleson's three horses to a pasture three miles down the Clear Fork; and I charged him nothing from the time I left Rath until my return; and so he remembered me in my present loss by making me a present of the horse.
Word now came to us that the entire border of the settlements was on the qui vive, from Fort Concho to Henrietta. From North Concho to the Brazos there was hardly a cattle ranch but had lost horses, the Indians having broken up into small parties; had stealthily slipped in and made a simultaneous raid for horses, taking them for a hundred miles up and down the border, and had closed, for the present, by gathering the clans together and setting the hunters afoot by their raid on Rath.
CHAPTER X.
The Staked Plains Horror.—A Forlorn Hope.—The Fate of the Benders.—Captain Nolan and His Troopers.—Quana Parker.—Rees the Hero of the Hour.
When the ranchmen heard of our predicament, they would not sell us horses, but would give every man a mount who had lost stock. Besides this, they wrote out and presented us with a "bill of sale" for every horse we could get from the Indians bearing their brands. In addition to all this, they made us a tender of money for supplies.
This they did for a two-fold reason: one was their time-honored generosity; the other was because so long as we were roaming the Plains, seeking the opportunity we so much desired, we were acting as a buffer between the Indians and the settlements. For they thought the red-skins would have all they could do to dodge us and keep what they had already stolen, without bothering them. When we finally got started there were just twenty-four of us in the party, afterward known as the "Forlorn Hope."