This was not all.  As the fighting men approached the wagons they saw a group of stern-faced women weeping around something which lay covered by a blanket on the ground.  Molly Wingate stooped, drew it back to show them.  Even Bridger winced.

An arrow, driven by a buffalo bow, had glanced on the spokes of a wheel, risen in its flight and sped entirely across the inclosure of the corral.  It had slipped through the canvas cover of a wagon on the opposite side as so much paper and caught fair a woman who was lying there, a nursing baby in her arms, shielding it, as she thought, with her body.  But the missile had cut through one of her arms, pierced the head of the child and sunk into the bosom of the mother deep enough to kill her also.  The two lay now, the shaft transfixing both; and they were buried there; and they lie there still, somewhere near the Grand Island, in one of a thousand unknown and unmarked graves along the Great Medicine Road.  Under the ashes of a fire they left this grave, and drove six hundred wagons over it, and the Indians never knew.

The leaders stood beside the dead woman, hats in hand.  This was part of the price of empire—­the life of a young woman, a bride of a year.

The wagons all broke camp and went on in a vast caravan, the Missourians now at the front.  Noon, and the train did not halt.  Banion urged the teamsters.  Bridger and Jackson were watching the many signal smokes.

“I’m afeard o’ the next bend,” said Jackson at length.

The fear was justified.  Early in the afternoon they saw the outriders turn and come back to the train at full run.  Behind them, riding out from the concealment of a clump of cottonwoods on the near side of the scattering river channels, there appeared rank after rank of the Sioux, more than two thousand warriors bedecked in all the savage finery of their war dress.  They were after their revenge.  They had left their village and, paralleling the white men’s advance, had forded on ahead.

They came out now, five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand, two thousand strong, and the ground shook under the thunder of the hoofs.  They were after their revenge, eager to inflict the final blow upon the white nation.

The spot was not ill chosen for their tactics.  The alkali plain of the valley swung wide and flat, and the trail crossed it midway, far back from the water and not quite to the flanking sand hills.  While a few dashed at the cattle, waving their blankets, the main body, with workman-like precision, strung out and swung wide, circling the train and riding in to arrow range.

The quick orders of Banion and his scouts were obeyed as fully as time allowed.  At a gallop, horse and ox transport alike were driven into a hurried park and some at least of the herd animals inclosed.  The riflemen flanked the train on the danger side and fired continually at the long string of running horses, whose riders had flung themselves off-side so that only a heel showed above a pony’s back, a face under his neck.  Even at this range a half dozen ponies stumbled, figures crawled off for cover.  The emigrants were stark men with rifles.  But the circle went on until, at the running range selected, the crude wagon park was entirely surrounded by a thin racing ring of steel and fire stretched out over two or three miles.