The squaw watched him furtively while she drew the deer sinew through the pieces of skin from which she was fashioning a moccasin. She understood, although spoken in English, the words he was scarce conscious of uttering, and, startled out of her Indian instinct of assumed inattention, looked at him with wide-opened eyes, trying to fathom a matter hardly comprehended but of great moment to her. "Take the child"--where, and for what? Was he going to leave and sail down the great river to the St. Louis whence came all traders and the soldiers on the boats? Going away again as he had come to her many seasons ago? "Take the child," her child and his? Her mouth closed firmly, her eyes darkened and narrowed, as she stooped suddenly and lifted the child to her lap; and the Indian mother's cunning and watchfulness were aroused and pitted against the white father's love of his child. Fort Atkinson was the most western post of the line established by President Monroe in 1819, after the Louisiana Purchase, to maintain the authority of the United States against Indian turbulence and British aggression, and had been in existence about four years before our story opens. Here had been stationed the Sixth U. S. Infantry, who had wearily tramped for two months the banks of the Missouri river and dragged their boats after them, a distance of nearly a thousand miles of river travel to reach this post in the wilderness. Not a white man then occupied what is now the state of Iowa, except Julien Dubuque and a score or so of French traders. Not a road was to be found nor a vehicle to traverse it. But one or two boats other than keel boats and barges had ever overcome the swift current of the great Missouri thus far. The Santa Fe trail, that wound over the hills west of the fort, connected them with the Mexican Spanish civilization of the Southwest, and the great rivers with their unsettled land far away on the Atlantic seaboard. Seventy-five years ago these soldiers dropped the ropes with which they had dragged the barges and keel boats and themselves thither, and picking up spade and shovel, dug foundations, molded and burned brick, cut down trees, and built barracks for themselves and the three detachments of artillery who terrified the redmen with the mysterious shells which dropped down amongst them and burst in such a frightful manner. They numbered about twelve hundred men, and the bricks they molded and the cellars they dug still remain to tell of the Fort Atkinson that was, beside whose ruins now stands the little village of Fort Calhoun, sixteen miles north of Omaha on the Missouri river. Dr. Gale, whom we have thus seen considering a question of great importance both to himself and to the Indian woman with whom he seems to have some relation, was the surgeon of the Sixth Infantry, an Englishman, short, thick-set, and evidently of good birth, although the marks of his rough life and rather dissolute habits obscured it in some degree.