These citizen scouts had been gathered from the Kansas river valleys. They knew why they had come hither. Each man had his own tragic picture of the Plains. They were a silent determined force which any enemy might dread, for they had a purpose to accomplish—even the redemption of the prairie from its awful peril.
The November days had slipped by without our regiment's appearance. The finding of an Indian trail toward the southwest caused Sheridan to loose Custer from further delay. Eagerly then he led forth his willing command out of Camp Supply and down the trail toward the Washita Valley, determined to begin at once on the winter's work.
The blizzard that had swept across the land had caught the Indian tribes on their way to the coverts of the Wichita Mountains, and forced them into winter quarters. The villages of the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, and the Arapahoe extended up and down the sheltering valley of the Washita for many miles. Here were Black Kettle and his band of Cheyenne braves—they of the loving heart at Fort Hays, they who had filled all the fair northern prairie lands with terror, whose hands reeked with the hot blood of the white brothers they professed to love. In their snug tepees were their squaws, fat and warm, well clothed and well fed. Dangling from the lodge poles were scalps with the soft golden curls of babyhood. No comfort of savage life was lacking to the papooses here. And yet, in the same blizzards wherein we had struggled and starved, half a score of little white children torn from their mothers' clinging arms, these Indians had allowed to freeze to death out on the Plains, while the tribes were hurrying through the storm to the valley. The fathers of some of these lost children were in that silent company under Pepoon, marching now with the Seventh Cavalry down upon the snow-draped tepees of Black Kettle and his tribe.
Oh, the cost of it all! The price paid out for a beautiful land and sheltered homes, and school privileges and Sabbath blessings! It was for these that men fought and starved and dared, and at last died, leaving only a long-faded ripple in the prairie sod where an unmarked grave holds human dust returned to the dust of the earth.
In the shelter of the Washita Valley on that twenty-seventh day of November, God's vengeance came to these Indians at the hands of General Custer. He had approached their village undiscovered. As the Indians had swooped down on Forsyth's sleeping force; as the yells of Black Kettle's braves had startled the sleeping settlers at dawn on Spillman Creek, the daybreak now marked the beginning of retribution. While the Seventh Cavalry band played "Garry Owen" as a signal for closing in, Custer's soldiery, having surrounded the village, fell upon it and utterly destroyed it. Black Kettle and many of his braves were slain, the tepees were burned, the Indians' ponies were slaughtered, and the squaws and children made captives.
News of this engagement reached Sheridan's garrison on the day after our arrival, with the word also that Custer, unable to cope with the tribes swarming down the Washita River, was returning to Camp Supply with his spoils of battle.
"Did you know, Phil," Bud Anderson said, "that Cuthter'th to have a grand review before the General and hith thtaff when he geth here to-morrow, and that'th all we'll thee of the thircuth. My! but I wish we could have been in that fight; don't you?"
"I don't know, Bud, I'd hate to come down here for nothing, after all we've gone through; but don't you worry about that; there'll be plenty to be done before the whole Cheyenne gang is finished."
"It'll be a sight worth seein' anyhow, this parade," O'mie declared. "Do you remember the day Judge Baronet took his squad out av Springvale, Phil? What a careless set av young idiots we were then?"
Did I remember? Could I be the same boy that watched that line of blue-coats file out of Springvale and across the rocky ford of the Neosho that summer day? It seemed so long ago; and this snow-clad valley seemed the earth's end from that warm sunny village. But Custer's review was to come, and I should see it.