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Updated: June 19, 2025
Guarded by Chrome's "infantry," as his unhorsed troopers were jocularly described, most of the wounded were being carried by short stages into Pawnee Station, where a field hospital had been established. Truman and Sanders were with these, but Winthrop, assuming command of all the cavalry that was available at the forks, had gone on in pursuit of Red Dog's renegade band.
He had accompanied the column, formally enrolled as a scout, and he would be guide and adviser to the white chief, yet shrank from personal part in the coming battle. He had been asked how many miles it was to the forks and replied fifteen, "but," said he, "it is much farther by the way the chief should go." "We want to go the shortest way," was Chrome's short reply.
Leatherby thought the matter over all day, as he sat in his dingy shop, which was only a few rods from Mr. Chrome's, where Paul was painting wagons, singing snatches of songs, and psalms and hymns. Mr. Leatherby loved to hear him. It made the days seem shorter. It rested him when he was tired, cheered him when he was discouraged. It was like sunshine in his soul, for it made him happy.
It was barely sunrise when Chrome's battalion struck the hostile camp this hot June day, and two hours later the situation was comfortless enough for the strikers. Hampered with their wounded and having lost a dozen horses killed, the two troops of the Eleventh on whom had devolved the harsher share of the work had been compelled to halt in the timber and stand off the now exultant Indians.
The knife wound, Red Dog's treacherous work, had reopened as a result of his violent throw to earth, and there was no surgeon nearer than Chrome's battalion, now out of sight far up the Ska. "Thank God! they've got few ponies left," said Cranston, fervently. "We can hold them here until help comes." And help was coming, hard and fast, harder and faster than Cranston dreamed, but not to them.
With a hundred mounted warriors at his back and as many more afoot in the village, Red Dog promptly took the offensive, sent his yelling braves in big circle all around the clump of timber in which Truman and Cranston had posted their men, cut off communication with Chrome's party, now "doing herd guard duty half a dozen miles up the Ska," as some of Cranston's men derisively said, and then, little by little, established the dismounted braves in every hollow, behind every little ridge or mound, and soon had a complete circle of fire all about the wearied little force.
She remembered that one of the pigs which Paul painted, when he was a boy, was hers; she also remembered how he sent Mr. Smith's old white horse on a tramp after a bundle of hay. Paul was on his way to Mr. Chrome's shop, to begin work for the day. He wondered at the crowd. He saw the sign, and laughed with the rest.
Sanders, acting as Chrome's adjutant, came riding back from the head of column at the very moment and reined about alongside his own troop commander. "I'd rather be here in my old place, sir, and you're in big luck to have it, Parson. The major says he wants to capture their whole pony herd, if it takes three troops to do it, and 'C' is to charge the village and rout out the bucks."
It was Chrome's idea, as he frankly said, to keep moving southwestward until Tintop's scouts should see the huge column of dust, and send forth to meet and guide him with his prizes to the colonel's camp. Every quarter-hour, therefore, was taking him farther and father away from his corralled comrades down-stream, but he refused to see it.
With the cavalry and all but one company of White's battalion gone from the agency there was ample opportunity, but it had not been foreseen. Then, three days later, by way of Pawnee, came the details of the fierce fighting on the Ska, of Truman's wound and Sanders's, of Chrome's catastrophe, the only humor in the situation being the contemplation of how Captain Canker must have sworn.
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