There were several dogs at the Walls, but all of them cut for tall timber when the fighting began and did not show up for several days. All our horses were killed or run off. The five horses that had been left in the stockade were quickly shot down, the Indians poking their guns between the cottonwood pickets. Four head tied to a wagon near Rath's were cruelly killed. I saw the Indians when they first rode up and tried to cut the rope with a butcher knife. One was a gray mare that was notorious for her vicious kicking. She would not let the Indians approach her, so all were shot. My own saddle horse, which I had owned for years and highly prized, was among the first to be shot, and still lay tied to the wagon when I found him. The Indians were not without military strategy. They had planned to put every man of us afoot, thereby leaving us without means of escape and powerless to send for aid save as some messenger might steal away in the darkness, to traverse on foot the weary distance and the dangerous and inhospitable region that lay between us and Dodge City. By holding us constantly at bay and keeping fresh detachments of warriors rallying to the attack they probably thought it possible to exhaust our strength, and then overwhelm us. It should be remembered that Adobe Walls was scarcely more than a lone island in the vast sea of the Plains, a solitary refuge uncharted and practically unknown. For the time we were at the end of the world, our desperate extremity pressing heavily upon us, and our friends and comrades to the north ignorant of what was taking place. At the first dash, the Indians had driven off all the horses they had found grazing in the little valley, and which Billy Ogg had gone in the dusk of dawn to round up preparatory to our departure for the hunting grounds. We counted fifty-six dead horses scattered in the immediate vicinity of the buildings, some with arrows sticking in their bodies, and others bored with bullets. Of these ten head belonged to the hunters. Added to this slaughter were the twenty-eight head of oxen that belonged to the Shadler brothers. In nearly every instance, a horse that had been wounded far from the buildings would stagger in our direction, apparently to get as close as possible to his friends. There they would stand in agony until the Indians shot them down, which happened in every instance.