For answer the sergeant by his side went plunging down, face foremost, and little Trooper Denny, rushing to aid his young officer in the effort to raise the stricken man, as suddenly loosed his hold and, together again, these two sworn comrades of many a campaign lay side by side, as they had lain in camp and bivouac all over the wide frontier, and poor Denny could only gasp a loyal word of warning to his officer. "Get back, sir; for God's sake, get back!" ere the life blood came gushing from his mouth. Bending low, Field grabbed the faithful fellow in his strong arms and, calling to the nearmost men to look to Wing, bore his helpless burden back through stifling smoke clouds; laid him on the turf at the foot of a cottonwood, then ran again to the perilous work of fighting the flame, stumbling midway over another prostrate form. "Both hands! Both hands!" he yelled as again his blanket whirled in air; and so, by dint of desperate work, the inner line of flame at last was stayed, but every man of the gallant little squad of fire fighters had paid the penalty of his devotion and felt the sting of hissing lead--Field the last of all. Westward now, well nigh an hundred yards in width, a broad, black, smoking patch stretched across the pathway of the swift-coming wall of smoke and flame, a safeguard to the beleaguered command worth all the soldier sacrifice it cost. In grand and furious sweep, the scourge of the prairie sent its destroying line across the wide level to the south of the sheltering grove, but in the blood and sweat of heroic men the threatening flames of the windward side had sputtered out. The little garrison was safe from one, at least, of its dread and merciless foes, though five of its best and bravest lay dead or dying, and others still sore stricken, in the midst of the smoking grove. "Field, old boy," said Ray, with brimming eyes, as he knelt and clasped the hand of the bleeding lad, while the Sioux fell back in wrath and dismay from the low-aimed, vengeful fire of the fighting line. "This means the Medal of Honor for you, if word of mine can fetch it!" CHAPTER XIII WOUNDED--BODY AND SOUL To say the Sioux were furious at the failure of their second attempt would be putting it far too mildly. The fierce charge from the northward side, made under cover of the blinding smoke sent drifting by the gale across the level flats, had been pushed so close to the grove that two red braves and half a dozen ponies had met their death within sixty paces of the rifle pits. There lay the bodies now, and the Indians dare not attempt to reach them. The dread, wind-driven flame of the prairie fire, planned by the Sioux to burn out the defence, to serve as their ally, had been turned to their grave detriment.