* * * * *

It was well past midnight.  The big full moon, high now in the sky, cast their shadows almost about their feet when, their labour complete, the party took up the homeward trail.  But there were twenty no longer.  At their head as before rode Landor, in his arms not a rifle but a blanket; a blanket from which as they journeyed on came now and anon a sound that was alien indeed:  the sobs of a baby girl who wept as she slept.  Back of him, likewise as when they had come, rode hatchet-faced Crosby; but he, too, was not as before.  His saddle had been removed and, in front of him, astride the horse’s bare back, warmed by the animal heat, was a brown waif of a boy; not asleep or even drowsy, but wide awake indeed, silently watchful as a prairie owl of every movement about him, every low-spoken word.  What whim of satirist chance had put him there, what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know, could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal.  Slowly now, weary to death with the long, long day, depressed with the inevitable reaction from the excitement of the past hours, they moved away, to the south, to the west.  In front of them, glittering in the moonlight, seemingly infinite, stretched the waves of the rolling prairie, bare as the sea in a calm.  Behind them, growing lesser and lesser minute by minute, merging into the infinite white, were three black dots like tiny boats on the horizon’s edge.  On they went, a half mile, a mile, looked behind; and, with an awe no familiarity could prevent, faced ahead anew.  Back of them now as well as before, uniformly endless, uniformly magnificent, stretched that giant ocean:  silent, serene, as mother nature, as nature’s master, God himself.

CHAPTER IV

RECONSTRUCTION

The day of the Indian terror had passed.  No longer did the name of Little Crow carry stampede in its wake.  The battles of Big Mound, of White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run.  Still in the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited massacre of Custer at the Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse, and of Gall, who had made the last great encounter bloodily unique in the conflict of the red man and the white, was never to be duplicated.  Rightly or wrongly deprived of what they had once called their own, driven back, back on the crest of the ever-increasing wave of settlement, facing the alternative of annihilation or of submergence in that flood, the Sioux had halted like a wild thing at bay, with their backs to the last stronghold, the richest plot of earth on the face of the globe, the Black Hills country, and as a cornered animal ever fights, had battled ferociously for a lost supremacy.  But, robbers themselves, holding