Page:Boots and Saddles.djvu/243

230 cabins they had painted elaborate and romantically expressed signs. In the midst of bleak surroundings rose an untidy canvas-covered cabin, called "My Lady's Bower," or over the door of a rough log-hut was a sign of the "Dew Drop Inn" (Do drop in).

These shanties were placed on a little rise of ground, with a precautionary thought of the usual spring floods. The day of the first ice-breaking we saw the water rise to such a height that cabin after cabin was abandoned. The occupants dragged their property as best they could to the little rise where one or two, more cautious than the rest, had built. On this narrow neck of land huddled together the whole of the group, in desperate peril. No one on our side of the river could help them, for the water was the maddest of whirlpools, while on the other side the overflow had made a great lake, cutting them off from Bismarck. As we watched them scrambling on the little knoll, like drowning men clinging to the upturned keel of a boat, we suffered real distress at our powerlessness to help them. The company commanders, remembering how they had been the cause of the demoralization of some of their best soldiers, openly avowed at first their relief that the whole wretched lot were about to drown; but as the peril increased, not one of the officers' hearts remained unsoftened. They forgot what an utterly abandoned, lawless company it was, and wished that some means might be found by which they could be saved.

We women had discovered through the field-glasses a few of our own sex among them, and were alarmed at their danger; for no matter what they were, the