For twenty miles this route was strewn with carbines, cartridge-belts, blankets, hats, blouses, pants, and cooking utensils, dead horses and mules, so that one object or a number of objects could be seen from one to another.
With those two officers and their colored soldiers was big raw-boned Barney Howard, black as a crow, and as kinky-wooled as his Congo Basin progenitors. He was the true hero of the occasion. After his own horse had been sacrificed, he said to the officers and men, "It would take worser dan dis for me to drap." And when Lieutenant Cooper handed him his watch and money that he had with him he asked Barney to give them to his (Cooper's) wife, if he (Barney) got through. Barney tied them up in the silk handkerchief that Mrs. Cooper had monogrammed, and said:
"I'll carry dese for you, sah, till we git to watah, for you isn't gwine to peter out and worry dat pooh little black-eyed woman, is you? No, sah, dat talk am all nonsense."
He threw military discipline aside and told Captain Nolan he ought to be ashamed of himself to set a whining patten (pattern) befo' his men. He would walk around among his weak, discouraged comrades, and tell them of the good things in store for them in the future. I had a long talk with this ebony-colored child of Ham, afterward, at Fort Concho. He was cut out for a regular, and it is but fair to presume that he climbed the San Juan hill, doing his duty in his capacity equally as well as Theodore Roosevelt did in his.
After recuperating, the soldiers went to Concho, and Captain Lee back to Fort Griffin.
What about the Indians?
That is another story, part of which was a revelation to us. They knew where we hunters were from day to day, and through an interpreter at Fort Sill, the next June, I listened to Cuatro Plumas's (Four Feathers) statement. He was born at the Big Springs of the Colorado.
They knew that Quinnie was coming to them. He was born at the south end of Laguna Sabinas, on the Staked Plains. One of the runners met Quinnie at the old camp they were in when they killed Sewall, and they told him where we were. After we had killed and wounded so many of them in March, they said they would never fight the hunters again, in a body. The lesson of the Adobe Walls, and that of the Casa Amarilla, as they called the place where we fought them in March, had taught them to not go up against the long-range guns that the hunters carried; and that they would just dodge and elude us until we got weary of the chase.