FROM THE STREET TO THE WILDS 249 



led by Roman Nose, upon the little band which 

 they outnumbered more than ten to one, while 

 from the banks above thirty times their number 

 of Arapahoe, Sioux, Comanche, and Kiowa sav- 

 ages poured upon the fated few a plunging fire. 



He pictured a charge that broke only when 

 the flashes from the weapons of the assailed 

 burned the bodies of the foremost assailants and 

 has never been paralleled in the history of Indian 

 warfare. 



He spoke of a night spent in creeping among, 

 and past, hostile camps, and a day in lying un- 

 der the blazing sun within a few hundred feet of 

 scores of hostile Indians, with death by torture 

 the sure result of the discovery that seemed in- 

 evitable. Jack's voice was tense as he talked of 

 Beecher and of his death in this, his last camp; 

 and then, in return, I told him of Fred Beech- 

 er's first camp of ten years before, when he and 

 I, schoolmates in far-off Andover, had slept 

 in the deep snow through an unforgetable Feb- 

 ruary night beside our first campfire, freezing 

 but happy, dreaming even then of some future, 



