"Oh, that's John Mac for you," Reed said laughing. "He's homesick."
"No, it's the horses that's homesick," John Mac answered. "They've got horse sense and that's what some of us ain't got. They know they'll never get across the Arkansas River again."
"Cheerful prospect," I declared. "That means we'll never get across either, doesn't it?"
"Oh, yes," John answered grimly, "we'll get back all right. Don't know as this lot'd be any special ornament to kingdom come, anyhow; but we'll go through hell on the way comin' or goin'; now, mark me, Reed, and stop your idiotic grinning."
Whatever may have given this nervousness to the horses, so like a presentiment of coming ill, they were all possessed with the same spirit, and we remembered it afterwards when their bones were bleaching on the high flat lands long leagues beyond the limits of civilization.
The Plains had no welcoming smile for us. The November skies were clouded over, and a steady rain soaked the land with all its appurtenances, including a straggling command of a thousand men floundering along day after day among the crooked canyons and gloomy sandhills of the Cimarron country. In vain we tried to find a trail that should lead us to Sheridan's headquarters at Camp Supply, on the Canadian River. Then the blizzard had its turn with us. Suddenly, as is the blizzard's habit, it came upon us, sheathing our rain-sodden clothing in ice. Like a cloudburst of summer was this winter cloudburst of snow, burying every trail and covering every landmark with a mocking smoothness. Then the mercury fell, and a bitter wind swept the open Plains.
We had left Fort Beecher with five days' rations and three days' forage. Seven days later we went into bivouac on a crooked little stream that empties its salty waters into the Cimarron. It was a moonless, freezing night. Fires were impossible, for there was no wood, and the buffalo chips soaked with rain were frozen now and buried under the snow. A furious wind threshed the earth; the mercury hovered about the zero mark. Alkali and salt waters fill the streams of that land, and our food supply was a memory two days old.
How precious a horse can become, the Plains have taught us. The man on foot out there is doomed. All through this black night of perishing cold we clung to our frightened, freezing, starving horses. We had put our own blankets about them, and all night long we led them up and down. The roar of the storm, the confusion from the darkness, the frenzy from hunger drove them frantic. A stampede among them there would have meant instant death to many of us, and untold suffering to the dismounted remainder. How slowly the cold, bitter hours went by! I had thought the burning heat of the Colorado September unendurable. I wondered in that time of freezing torment if I should ever again call the heat a burden.
There were five of us tramping together in one little circle that night—Reed and John Mac, and Pete and Hadley, with myself. In all the garrison I came to know these four men best. They were near my own age; their happy-go-lucky spirit and their cheery laughter were food and drink. They proved to me over and over how kind-hearted a soldier can be, and how hard it is to conquer a man who wills himself unconquerable. Without these four I think I should never have gotten through that night.
Morning broke on our wretched camp at last, and we took up the day's march, battling with cold and hunger over every foot of ground. On the tenth day after we crossed the Arkansas River the crisis came. Our army clothes were waiting for us at Camp Supply. Rain and ice and the rough usage of camp life had made us ragged already, and our shoes were worn out. And still the cold and storm stayed with us. We wrapped pieces of buffalo hide about our bare feet and bound the horses' nose-bags on them in lieu of cavalry boots. Our blankets we had donated to our mounts, and we had only dog tents, well adapted to ventilation, but a very mockery at sheltering.