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Tintop boiled over at the sight of so unhorsemanlike a proceeding and rode wrathfully at Devers to rebuke him. "Why, colonel," said Devers, "I wouldn't have done it for the world, but Mr. Gray was so positive in saying it must be done when they went out, I couldn't do otherwise.
Next day, before the side lines were put on, in some mysterious way Devers's herd was stampeded and ran six miles before they could be rounded up, and he explained it was all because they weren't side-lined in the first place, as they were always accustomed to being, and as the regulations required they should be in the Indian country. This was another thing to make Tintop blaspheme.
It was too near civilization, said Truman. Tintop had his warriors under his own wing after the close of the fighting season, and they were having grand times at Ransom. There this winter were most of the familiar names and faces.
Therefore, while Tintop, Black Bill, Riggs, and his seniors generally could never refer to Devers except with sympathetic swear words, there were not a few of the officers junior in rank to his who found no little fun in all these incidents. Like most stories in or out of the army, they were perhaps exaggerative, but, like smoke, they could not exist without smouldering fire.
Then, one day, Tintop in so many words ordered the captain hereafter not to do as he thought, but simply as his colonel said, and this led to the final incident, still more side-splitting, one that the boys in the regiment never tired of telling.
He and his command had had a sharp, stubborn fight with a big force of hostiles that very day, with considerable loss to both. "If you had been here with your men," Tintop said, "I believe we could have cleaned them out entirely."
But Chrome said that wouldn't do; it would wake up or startle everybody in camp, and so declined. "It's all your fancy," he said. "There are none of our fellows with Tintop, and " "But he knows you, with at least two troops of the th, are somewhere out here, sir, and he takes a regimental way of trying to communicate with you. I beg you to listen one moment more. There!"
Already settlers were drifting in to Pawnee station and Minden on the railway to the west, and besieging old Tintop at regimental head-quarters at Fort Ransom, and stirring up "screamers" in the columns of the infantile dailies at Butte and Braska, alleging apathy on part of the authorities and cowardice on that of the cavalry.
Well he knew his unpopularity and sagely judged his opportunities. The liberties he had dared with Warren he would not now have ventured with Riggs, or Black Bill, or old Tintop, one and all of whom had learned to know him well, and would have been prepared for some such betrayal of the trust reposed in him.
Tintop had to part with two of his pet companies Cranston's and Hay's at the reluctant orders from department head-quarters. Still a fourth had to be sent, and Truman was taken from the lieutenant-colonel and Major Warren despatched from head-quarters to Scott as commander of this cavalry battalion or squadron at the very moment when he was clinching his arrangements for long leave of absence.
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