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Updated: June 19, 2025
It was an hour later that Sheeta, the panther, hunting, chanced to glance upward into the blue sky where his attention was attracted by Ska, the vulture, circling slowly above the bush a mile away and downwind. For a long minute the yellow eyes stared intently at the gruesome bird.
Only around the protecting agency, miles to the west, miles deeper in among the tumbling hills, were the lodges now clustered, hundreds of them, with their swarming occupants, old men, old crones, Indian mothers, wives, sweethearts, maids, young boys, children, and pappooses, all confidingly clinging to the protecting hand of the Great Father and claiming his bounty; while the husbands and fathers, the stalwart young warriors of the Sioux themselves, were skulking through the Bad Lands across the Ska, eagerly, warily watching the coming of the little cavalry column from the distant Chasing Water, while even in greater numbers their wild red cohorts patrolled the deep valley, the overhanging heights of the Ska itself, watching every move of the coming force from Ransom, bent on luring both, if possible, far within their borders, far in among those tangling, treacherous ravines and cañons, and, there surrounding, to massacre the last man.
When Colonel Emerson in regimental orders lauded the devotion of Sergeant Foley, who swam the icy Missouri with despatches from Captain Cameron's beleaguered command, and ordered a handsome collar to be made by the regimental saddler to be worn thereafter by his gallant gray, now transferred to the band because of the cuts and scars he had received in that fierce campaign, Devers similarly decorated Trumpeter Finnegan's bull terrier "Mike," who swam the Mini Ska in pursuit of his master the night of the wintry dash on Tall Bull's village, and gravely paraded "Mike" with the troop next muster day.
Red Dog was known to be with a remnant of his band somewhere in the wild Bad Lands to the north of the Ska, and the last heard from the colonel was that he, with six troops of the Eleventh, was scouring the southern limit of those dismal features of our frontier landscape, looking for Red Dog not far to the north of Antelope Springs.
For a day Tarzan toiled across this now hateful land and at the going down of the sun the distant mountains to the west seemed no nearer than at morn. Never a sign of living thing had the ape-man seen, other than Ska, that bird of ill omen, that had followed him tirelessly since he had entered this parched waste.
An hour later still and the bluffs were throwing long shadows across the valley, and the crack of Indian rifles and occasional loud bark of the carbine close at hand seemed growing more frequent, and watchers at the outskirts became conscious of increasing excitement among the warriors up the valley to the west as well as over to the south, and listening men, laying their ears to earth, declared that there was tremor and vibration, and dull distant thunder of myriad hoofs, and over in the village there was hurrying to and fro and growing clamor of squaws and children, and dusky women could be seen clutching their little ones and speeding away towards the hills down-stream, while others began rapidly tearing down the painted lodges of hide or cloth, and such Indians as had no mount, but were skulking under the banks or among the bluffs across the stream, could be seen leaping and crouching and racing back toward the village, and presently there went up a shout from the lookouts towards the upper Ska: "Big dust-cloud coming.
A hundred miles away, a hundred as the crow flies, and not by the tortuous route the cavalry had to follow, through a region that, all in an hour's march, shifted its scene from the dull monotone of barren waves of prairie to bold, beautiful heights and deep sheltered ravines and cañons, the winding thread of the Mina Ska went foaming and leaping over its stony bed, taking occasional cat-naps in wide, shadowy shallows, only to wake up again to wilder riot under the frowning, fir-crested cliffs of the Black Rock Range.
Then, as the wounded were led back to the Ska and he recovered strength and was happy in seeing his Indian protectors lavishly fed, clothed, and rewarded, he began to talk of the events of the campaign of the previous summer and to inquire why the captain was away now; and then Hastings and Archer took him in hand, and later poor stricken Haney, conscious of the approaching end, begged to see him, and then came Haney's broken confession.
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.
The officers were seated about him at a tiny fire, and Cranston quickly lighted a candle lantern and the major read. It was from the officer of the picket. "Thunder Hawk and Rides Double just in from over toward the Ska. They say they have seen 'plenty warriors' all day and are sure there has been a big fight far across the valley.
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