It all became a quiet, steady, matter-of-fact performance on both sides.  This very freedom from action and excitement, so different from the gallant riding of the Sioux, was more terrifying than direct attack en masse, so that when it came to a matter of shaken morale the whites were in as bad case as their foes, although thus far they had had no casualty at all.

There lacked the one leader, cool, calm, skilled, experienced, although courage did not lack.  Yet even the best courage suffers when a man hears the wailing of his children back of him, the groans of his wife.  As the hours passed, with no more than an occasional rifle shot or the zhut! of an arrow ending its high arc, the tension on the nerves of the beleaguered began to manifest itself.

At midday the children began to cry for water.  They were appeased with milk from the few cows offering milk; but how long might that last, with the cattle themselves beginning to moan and low?

“How far are they back?”

It was Hall, leader of the Ohio wagons.  But none could tell him where the Missouri train had paused.  Wingate alone knew why Banion had not advanced.  He doubted if he would come now.

“And this all was over the quarrel between two men,” said Caleb Price to his friend Wingate.

“The other man is a thief, Cale,” reiterated Wingate.  “He was court-martialed and broke, dishonorably discharged from the Army.  He was under Colonel Doniphan, and had control of subsistence in upper Mexico for some time.  He had the regimental funds.  Doniphan was irregular.  He ran his regiment like a mess, and might order first this officer, then that, of the line or staff, to take on his free-for-all quartermaster trains.  But he was honest.  Banion was not.  He had him broken.  The charges were filed by Captain Woodhull.  Well, is it any wonder there is no love lost?  And is it any wonder I wouldn’t train up with a thief, or allow him to visit in my family?  By God! right now I wouldn’t; and I didn’t send for him to help us!”

“So!” said Caleb Price.  “So!  And that was why the wedding—­”

“Yes!  A foolish fancy of a girl.  I don’t know what passed between her and Banion.  I felt it safer for my daughter to be married, as soon as could be, to another man, an honest man.  You know how that came out.  And now, when she’s as apt to die as live, and we’re all as apt to, you others send for that renegade to save us!  I have no confidence that he will come.  I hope he will not.  I’d like his rifles, but I don’t want him.”

“Well,” said Caleb Price, “it is odd how his rifles depend on him and not on the other man.  Yet they both lived in the same town.”

“Yes, one man may be more plausible than another.”

“Yes?  I don’t know that I ever saw a man more plausible with his fists than Major Banion was.  Yes, I’ll call him plausible.  I wish some of us—­say, Sam Woodhull, now—­could be half as plausible with these Crows.  Difference in men, Jess!” he concluded.  “Woodhull was there—­and now he’s here.  He’s here—­and now we’re sending there for the other man.”