Troop H, 7th Regiment, was holding the fort while the other companies went north to avenge.
The First Lieutenant of Troop H was a beardless youth just from West Point. He had been shot out of West Point into the saddle and to the front. Two months of it had bronzed him and added two years to his looks; but sentiment was still in him and Romance claimed his for her own. He had had enough fighting for any ordinary trooper, but to-day he felt sad that three companies had gone north after the marauders and he—he held the peaceful fort.
The sun was setting across the great plains and shadows had lengthened to their uttermost when a man on a cow-pony galloped in, not from the north, but from the west.
His pony was reeling at the first gate. It was dead in the fort ten minutes later. The man himself carried two Comanche arrows sticking through a shoulder and an arm. A gash was in his head from a glancing arrow and blood ran from another that had cut across his forehead.
He was unconscious before the surgeon could extract the arrows from his body, but he said enough. The Comanches were not north, but west—they had attacked him in his little squatter cabin forty miles west—they had killed all his stock but one pony—he had no family but a little girl—he had escaped on the pony. “An’ the little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out in the side of a hill—a kind of a cellar—where I kept pertatoes an’ sich—then—wal—”
He went to sleep.
“Let him sleep,” said the surgeon, “he is nearly gone as it is—forty miles and blood leakin’ out of him every jump of the pony.”
Ten minutes later the bugler called “boots and saddles,” and when Company H wheeled in the fort’s square, the Captain said:
“Well, men, the boys are on a cold trail. You have heard where the devils are; we can’t all go. Half of us must stay behind to hold the fort. I’ll be fair to all, for I know you all want to go, so count by twos.”
“One,”