"Aw, how do I know?" replied Wallace, without looking around. Then he added, "Oh, yes; he was just over there a minute ago." He jerked his head vaguely to the right.
Al went on and almost immediately encountered the Captain, accompanied by eight or ten men, in a little gully where they had stopped to breathe. Though panting and soaked with perspiration, the men were firing up at the rocks above them but, at the moment when Al arrived, the Captain's revolver lay on the ground at his feet and his drawn sabre was thrust under one arm while he was picking with his right thumb and forefinger at a tiny splinter in the palm of his left hand. His face wore an absorbed expression and he moved his head slowly from side to side as he worked. He seemed entirely unconscious that anything was happening around him.
"Captain Miner," said Al, hardly able to repress a laugh as he saluted, "General Sully says for you not to get too far ahead of the flanks. He is afraid you will be surrounded."
The Captain looked up at him with a glance of pathetic helplessness.
"Why, my boy," said he, "how can I help it? We are already surrounded. We must keep going ahead or we shall be cleaned out. I'm sorry. I wish the General understood the situation."
Having extracted the splinter, he picked up his revolver again, stepped to a rock and peered around it.
"They seem to be afraid to go out of there, don't they?" he said to his men, thoughtfully, after a moment's inspection of the enemy's position. "I believe perhaps we'd better drive them. Yes, let's do that. Come on, boys. Charge!"
The soldiers gave a yell and scrambled out of the gully, Al with them, and the Captain climbing and jumping over the rocks just ahead. On either side of them other men of the Coyotes sprang up to join the advance; and farther to the right, up the side of the ravine, the Winnebago scouts of Captain Stufft, and Captain Williams's company of the Sixth Iowa, surged forward also. A hundred or more Indians sprang away from their hiding-places beyond and hurried higher up the ravine, some of them pausing to fire at their pursuers.