In the whirl and excitement following the startling outcry from the flats, all Fort Frayne was speedily involved. The guard came rushing through the night, Corporal Shannon stumbling over a prostrate form,--the sentry on Number Six, gagged and bound. The steward shouted from the hospital porch that Eagle Wing, the prisoner patient, had escaped through the rear window, despite its height above the sloping ground. A little ladder, borrowed from the quartermaster's corral, was found a moment later. An Indian pony, saddled Sioux fashion, was caught running, riderless, toward the trader's back gate, his horsehair bridle torn half way from his shaggy head. Sergeant Crabb, waiting for no orders from the major, no sooner heard that Moreau was gone, than he rushed his stable guard to the saddleroom, and in fifteen minutes had, not only his own squad, but half a dozen "casual" troopers circling the post in search of the trail, and in less than half an hour was hot in chase of two fleeing horsemen, dimly seen ahead through the starlight, across the snowy wastes. That snowfall was the Sioux's undoing. Without it the trail would have been invisible at night. With it, the pursued were well-nigh hopeless from the start. Precious time had been lost in circling far out south of the post before making for the ford, whither Crabb's instinct sent him at once, to the end that he and two of his fellows ploughed through the foaming waters, barely five hundred yards behind the chase, and, as they rode vehemently onward through the starlight, straining every nerve, they heard nothing of the happenings about the Fosters' doorway, where by this time post commander, post surgeon, post quartermaster and acting post adjutant, post ordnance, quartermaster and commissary sergeants, many of the post guard and most of the post laundresses had gathered--some silent, anxious and bewildered, some excitedly babbling; while, within the sergeant's domicile, Esther Dade, very pale and somewhat out of breath, was trying with quiet self possession to answer the myriad questions poured at her, while Dr. Waller was ministering to the dazed and moaning sentry, and, in an adjoining tenement, a little group had gathered about an unconscious form. Someone had sent for Mrs. Hay, who was silently, tearfully chafing the limp and almost lifeless hands of a girl in Indian garb. The cloak and skirts of civilization had been found beneath the window of the deserted room, and were exhibited as a means of bringing to his senses a much bewildered major, whose first words on entering the hut gave rise to wonderment in the eyes of most of his hearers, and to an impulsive reply from the lips of Mrs. Hay. "I warned the general that girl would play us some Indian trick, but he ordered her release," said Flint, and with wrathful emphasis came the answer. "The general warned you _this_ girl would play you a trick, and, thanks to no one but you, she's done it!"