CHAPTER XIX
SAVED FROM HIMSELF
The morning of August twelfth dawned with burning heat. The lake lay as smooth as a sea of glass and from the south-west came the dreaded wind of the prairies, hot as a blast from a furnace and laden with dust. The sun blazed pitilessly in a cloudless sky and countless Indians patrolled the Fort, the Agency House, and the trading station.
The newcomers were alive with curiosity. Many of them had never seen the Fort before, and they swarmed in and out unceasingly. Through the wicket gate and the main entrance, past the soldiers' barracks, guard-house, hospital, storehouse, magazine, and contractor's store, back and forth between the officers' barracks, the Indians continually passed. They lay down on their faces to smell of the drain, muttered unintelligibly when they came to the subterranean passage, and wondered at the flag, with its fifteen stripes and fifteen stars, that hung limply at the staff.
They openly defied the sentinels at the gate, climbed into the blockhouses, where they surreptitiously felt of the cannon and peered furtively into the muzzles, and even went into the officers' quarters. It was the kind of a visit that one makes to an occupied house, on the eve of taking possession.
"Wallace," said Mrs. Franklin, "isn't there any way to keep these people out of the Fort?"
"Why, I hadn't thought about it," returned the Captain, absently. "They're not doing any harm, are they?"
"They haven't as yet," retorted Mrs. Franklin, with spirit, "but they're likely to at any moment. I don't want them in my house, and I won't have them here!"