And for seven days that was the last heard, by the garrison, at least, of these most recent captives of the Sioux. Gentle and sympathetic women, however, who called on Mrs. Hay, were prompt to note that though unnerved, unstrung, distressed, she declared again and again her faith that the Indians would never really harm her husband. They might hold him and Nanette as hostages for ransom. They might take for their own purposes his wagon, his mules and that store of money, but his life was safe, yes, and Nanette's too. Of this she was so confident that people began to wonder whether she had not received some assurance to that effect, and when Pete, the stable boy driver, turned up at the end of the first week with a cock-and-bull story about having stolen an Indian pony and shot his way from the midst of the Sioux away up on No Wood Creek, on the west side of the hills, and having ridden by night and hidden by day until he got back to the Platte and Frayne, people felt sure of it. Pete could talk Sioux better than he could jabber English. He declared the Indians were in the hills by thousands, and were going to take Hay and the young lady away off somewhere to be held for safe keeping. He said the two troops that, never even halting at Frayne, had pushed out on the trail, would only get into trouble if they tried to enter the hills from the South, and that they would never get the captives, wherein Pete was right, for away out among the spurs and gorges of the range, fifty miles from Frayne, the pursuers came upon the wreck of the wagon at the foot of an acclivity, up which a force of Sioux had gone in single file. Many warriors it would seem, however, must have joined the party on the way, and from here,--where with the wagon was found Hay's stout box, bereft of its contents,--in four different directions the pony tracks of little parties crossed or climbed the spurs, and which way the captives had been taken, Captain Billings, the commander, could not determine. What the Sioux hoped he might do was divide his force into four detachments and send one on each trail. Then they could fall upon them, one by one, and slay them at their leisure. Billings saw the game, however, and was not to be caught. He knew Bill Hay, his past and his popularity among the red men. He knew that if they meant to kill him at all they would not have taken the trouble to cart him fifty miles beforehand. He dropped the stern chase then and there, and on the following day skirted the foothills away to the east and, circling round to the breaks of the Powder as he reached the open country, struck and hard hit a scouting band of Sioux, and joined the general three days later, when most he was needed, near the log palisades of old Fort Beecher.