Gloom sat on us
all, for fever now raged among our wounded. Pests of flies by day and
mosquitoes by night became almost unbearable. The sun blistered us, the
night froze us. Still not a sign of any white-topped wagon from the
east, nor any dust-cloud of troopers from the west served to break the
monotony of the shimmering waste that lay about us on every hand. We
were growing gaunt now and haggard; but still we lay, waiting for our
men to grow strong enough to travel, or to lose all strength and so be
laid away.
We had no touch with the civilization of the outer world. At that time
the first threads of the white man's occupancy were just beginning to
cross the midway deserts. Near by our camp ran the recently erected line
of telegraph, its shining cedar poles, stripped of their bark, offering
wonder for savage and civilized man alike, for hundreds of miles across
an uninhabited country. We could see the poles rubbed smooth at their
base by the shoulders of the buffalo. Here and there a little tuft of
hair clung to some untrimmed knot. High up in some of the naked poles we
could see still sticking, the iron shod arrows of contemptuous
tribesmen, who had thus sought to assail the "great medicine" of the
white man.
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