But the team, although ready, did not start northward at ten, and the general, though he saw Mrs. Hay, had no speech with her upon the important matters uppermost in his mind during the earlier hours of the day. He found that good lady in a state of wild excitement and alarm. One of the two outriders who had started with her husband and niece at dawn, was mounted on a dun-colored cow pony, with white face and feet. One of the two troopers sent by Dade to overtake and bring them back, was turning a blown and exhausted horse over to the care of Hay's stablemen, as he briefly told his story to the wild-eyed, well nigh distracted woman. Six miles up stream, he said, they had come suddenly upon a dun-colored cow pony, dead in his tracks, with white feet in air and white muzzle bathed in blood; bridle, saddle and rider gone; signs of struggle in places--but no signs of the party, the team and wagon, anywhere. "And no cavalry to send out after them!" said Dade, when he reached the spot. Old Crabb was called at once, and mustered four semi-invalided troopers. The infantry supplied half a dozen stout riders and, with a mixed escort, the general, accompanied by Dade and the aide-de-camp, drove swiftly to the scene. Six miles away they found the dead pony. Seven miles away they encountered the second trooper, coming back. He had followed the trail of the four mule team as far as yonder point, said he, and there was met by half a dozen shots from unseen foe, and so rode back out of range. But Dade threw his men forward as skirmishers; found no living soul either at the point or on the banks of the rocky ford beyond; but, in the shallows, close to the shore, lay the body of the second outrider, shot and scalped. In a clump of willows lay another body, that of a pinto pony, hardly cold, while the soft, sandy shores were cut by dozens of hoof tracks--shoeless. The tracks of the mules and wagon lay straight away across the stream bed--up the opposite bank and out on the northward-sweeping bench beyond. Hay's famous four, and well-known wagon, contents and all, therefore, had been spirited away, not toward the haunts of the road agents in the mountains of the Medicine Bow, but to those of the sovereign Sioux in the fastnesses of the storied Big Horn. CHAPTER XVI NIGHT PROWLING AT FRAYNE