402 INDIANS. 



upright logs set two feet into the ground, the upper ends 

 sawed off level, a plate of timber put on the top, and 

 each picket or log fastened in its place by a wooden pin, 

 an inch in diameter, through the plate into the end of the 

 picket. The stable inside of the corral was built in the 

 same way, but more carefully and of heavier materials. 

 Two sentinels walked around this stable during the night, 

 and a stable guard slept within. One morning after a 

 dark and stormy night it was discovered that several 

 pickets had been removed from the fence and from the 

 stable by sawing off with a knife the pins in the upper 

 end and digging out the earth from the lower, and two 

 horses were taken. Though the work must have taken 

 several hours and the sentinels must have been changed 

 during its performance, not one had seen or heard any- 

 thing suspicious while on his post. From the fact that 

 the two best horses were stolen from nearly the opposite 

 ends of the stable, with nothing in the position or the 

 stall to indicate favouritism, the commanding officer was 

 inclined to believe that the thieves were white men, who 

 had visited the stables beforehand, and that one or more 

 of the sentinels were in collusion. A lieutenant with 

 half a dozen men and a good guide were soon on the 

 trail, and, after a race of sixty miles, they at daylight 

 next morning surprised two Indians, killed both, and 

 rescued the horses. None but Comanches could ever 

 have taken out those pickets under the very noses of the 

 sentinels, or selected in the dark the two best out of sixty 

 or seventy horses. 



The corral fence at Fort Lincoln was made of thorny 

 chaparral bush, tightly pressed between upright posts set 

 by twos. It was impassable for white man or horse, yet 

 not a week of the first summer after the establishment of 

 the post passed that Indians did not cross this fence and 

 cut horses from the picket line. Fortunately they could 

 not get the horses over it after they got possession of 

 them ; and one or two of the thieves having been wounded 



