He was striding off when I interrupted: "Wait! Montgomery, he has six deer already hung."
"Good! The more the better! Fetch the other lads, Brown, and bring in your game. If you see more deer, do what you can to bring them in too."
Brown saluted the second time, and started off at a dogtrot.
I looked inquiringly into the Lieutenant's darkening face and thought I read his purpose. "If any of the horses come through alive, they will nevertheless be too outworn for farther travel within many weeks. You propose to go into winter quarters?"
"No!" he answered almost angrily.
"Yet the horses?" I argued.
"Poor beasts!" he sighed. "Would that I might put them out of their misery—such of their number as the men may bring alive out of that rocky waste! Yet we cannot spare them, and the fewer the survivors, the greater our need to cherish them. We will build a stockade, and leave the beasts here in the charge of two or three of the men."
"Leave them! And what of ourselves?"
"We will go on in search of the Red River."
"Afoot? In midwinter?"