Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/402

 Fort Lincoln, but duty pointed to Deadwood, and straight to Deadwood Crook went. His two and a half days' rations were made to last five; the Rees were sent in with despatches as fast as their ponies could travel to Lincoln, to inform Sheridan of our whereabouts, and to ask that supplies be hurried out from Camp Robinson to meet us. With anything like decent luck we ought to be able to force a fight and capture a village with its supplies of meat. Still, it was plain that all the heroism of our natures was to be tried in the fire before that march should be ended; Bubb concealed seventy pounds of beans to be used for the sick and wounded in emergencies; Surgeon Hartsuff carried in his saddle-bags two cans of jelly and half a pound of cornstarch, with the same object; the other medical officers had each a little something of the same sort—tea, chocolate, etc. This was a decidedly gloomy outlook for a column of two thousand men in an unknown region in tempestuous weather. We had had no change of clothing for more than a month since leaving Goose Creek, and we were soaked through with rain and mud, and suffering greatly in health and spirits in consequence.

We left the Heart River in the cold, bleak mists of a cheerless morning, which magnified into grim spectres the half-dozen cottonwoods nearest camp, which were to be imprinted upon memory with all the more vividness, because until we had struck the Belle Fourche, the type of the streams encountered in our march was the same—timberless, muddy, and sluggish. The ground was covered with grass, alternating with great patches of cactus. Villages of prairie dogs extended for leagues, and the angry squeak of the population was heard on all sides. "Jack," the noble Newfoundland dog which had been with us since we started out from the mouth of Powder, was now crazy for some fresh meat, and would charge after the prairie dogs with such impetuosity that when he attempted to seize his victim, and the loosely packed soil around the burrow had given way beneath their united weight, he would go head over heels, describing a complete somersault, much to his own astonishment and our amusement. After turning the horses out to graze in the evening, it generally happened that camp would be visited by half a dozen jack rabbits, driven out of their burrows by fear of the horses' hoofs. The soldiers derived great enjoyment every time one was started, and as poor pussy darted from bush to bush, doubled and