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"The frontier army post," writes Professor F. J. Turner, "serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement." When the Fifth Infantry built its cantonment on the Minnesota River there were no other habitations in the neighborhood.
We dropped a tear to the memory of the poor fellows who had here fallen, and committed their fleshless bones to the earth. Having arrived at our new place of encampment, we found that some temporary barracks had been erected there, for two regiments, the year before. The site of our new cantonment was marked out. It was on the banks of a beautiful lake, well stocked with fish and wild fowl.
His persistent demands would have ended, at Dan's instigation, in a regimental belting which in all probability would have killed him and cut off the supply of beer, had not he been sent on special duty some fifty miles away from the cantonment to cool his heels in a mud fort and dismount obsolete artillery.
He was useful because he could speak English, and he had been dressing-boy to a married Sahib who lived in a big house at the end of the Cantonment, therefore he knew something of the ways of Mem-Sahibs; and he had taken a prize at the Sunday school, therefore Absalom was a boy of good character, and was known very nearly as well as Mhtoon Pah himself.
The prince of Bevern, on the twentieth of the same month, having marched at the head of a body of the army, which was in Lusatia, from the quarters of cantonment near Zittau, possessed himself immediately of the first post on the frontier of Bohemia, at Krouttau and Grasenstein, without the loss of a single man; drove away the enemy the same day from Kratzen, and proceeded to Machendorf, near Reichenberg.
One soft spring morning, some two weeks later, a little knot of officers had gathered about the Cranstons' quarters at the cantonment. Under an awning of tent flies they were conning the papers that had just reached them and eagerly discussing their contents. Mrs. Cranston, a shade of anxiety on her winsome, sunburned face, was glancing quickly from one speaker to another.
The sepoys, after their work of destruction, must have left during the night, and were now probably well on their way to Delhi, while the badmashes who had assisted them had returned quietly to their occupations in the bazaars of the city. The cantonment presented a complete scene of desolation.
Young Chinn, walking like a man in a dream, had fetched a compass round the entire cantonment before going to his own tiny cottage.
Hallowell gave a hasty look toward the point indicated, and replied, "Indians! by George!" and immediately turning the mules around on the Trail, started them back toward the cantonment on the Walnut at a full gallop. "Hold on!" said Booth to Hallowell when he understood the latter's movement; "maybe it's part of our escort." "No! no!" replied Hallowell.
Starting with all speed from the cantonment, according to his instructions from Major White, he soon slowed down to a pace more in accordance with his own views. "If we get there Monday or Tuesday even," said he, "we'll be 'way ahead of Tintop." And this was at the close of the second day's march, when he could point to less than a total of forty-four miles covered.
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