And all this while there were other lives and other fates and other fortunes almost as desperately entangled and endangered. The general had summoned Stone to follow him afield. It was hard work finding those scattered wards of the nation, those lambs of the flock fled afar from the agency, and Stone left with the fate of his three wood guards still undetermined, for the soldiers had searched in vain. He left, too, with most of his men, while Major Layton, ordered up from Niobrara, took temporary command of the post, Dwight being, as yet, unfit for duty of any kind. Stone was a week away, scouting through the Sagamore and over toward the Belle Fourche, and brought back with him some four-score "reds" of various ages and sexes, and two well-nigh starved and exhausted men, two of French's devoted band, who, they said, had been sent out the night before the attack to build and fire a beacon on the summit of a tall, sharp, pine-crested height a mile away from camp. French thought the signal might bring help from the post. They never reached that crest. They heard the Indians shouting to each other in pursuit. They made their way farther into the hills and lived on what they had in their haversacks, hiding by day, for the hills seemed full of redskins. They were taken to hospital to recuperate, and meantime, while Stone's battalion settled down again into quarters, and business at Skidmore's resumed its normal aspect, and the guard and prisoners their abnormal number, Major Layton returned to Niobrara after imparting to Colonel Stone a story he had succeeded in tracing back to three sentries, a story he could neither stifle nor throttle, and that he left with Colonel Stone to deal with as best he might; and Stone, thinking again, as he had thought a thousand times before, of that letter in feminine hand, and in his private desk, felt his heart go down to his boots. In brief, the story was that twice during the week a young and slender officer had issued from the rear gate of Lieutenant Purdy's quarters, made his way in the black shadows of the fence-line to the rear gate of Major Dwight's, where once, at least No. 4 could swear, it was nearly an hour before he reappeared. Stone took council that very evening with Waring, the senior surgeon. Waring had just come from Rays', saying little Jim, though dreadfully weak and emaciated, was surely convalescing--that Dwight, with all his joy, seemed humbler than a little child. "I believe, by gad, that in his present frame of mind he'd forgive her, that incomprehensible little wretch of a wife of his, no matter what she'd done, if she'd come and ask him now."