back, and we who had gone out mounted now found ourselves a helpless intantry. Slowly the tribes had come to Custer's terms. When delay and cunning device were no longer of any avail they submitted--all except the Cheyennes, who had escaped to the Southwest. Spring was coming, and the Indians and their ponies could live in comfort then. It was only in the winter that United States rations and tents were vital. With the summer they could scorn the white man's help, and more: they could raid again the white man's land, seize his property, burn his home, and brain him with their cruel tomahawks; while as to his wife and children, oh, the very fiends of hell could not devise an equal to their scheme of life for them. The escape of the Cheyennes from Custer's grasp was but an earnest of what Kiowa, Arapahoe and Comanche could do later. These Cheyennes were setting an example worthy of their emulation. Not quite, to the Cheyenne's lordly spirit, not quite had the cavalry conquered the Plains. And now the Cheyenne could well gloat over the failure of the army after all it had endured; for spring was not very far away, the barren Staked Plains, in which the soldier could but perish, were between them and the arm of the Government, and our cavalrymen were now mere undisciplined foot-soldiers. It was to subdue this very spirit, to strike the one most effectual blow, the conquest of the Cheyennes, that the last act of that winter campaign was undertaken. This, and one other purpose. I had been taught in childhood under Christian culture that it is for the welfare of the home the Government exists. Bred in me through many generations of ancestry was the high ideal of a man's divine right to protect his roof-tree and to foster under it those virtues that are built into the nation's power and honor. I had had thrust upon me in the day of my young untried strength a heavy sense of responsibility. I had known the crushing anguish of feeling that one I loved had fallen a prey to a savage foe before whose mastery death is a joy. I was now to learn the truth of all the teaching along the way. I was to see in the days of that late winter the finest element of power the American flag can symbolize--the value set upon the American home, over which it is a token of protection. This, then, was that other purpose of this campaign--the rescue of two captive women, seized and dragged away on that afternoon when Bud and O'mie and I leaned against the south wall of old Fort Hays in the October sunshine and talked of the hazard of Plains warfare. But of this other purpose the privates knew nothing at all. The Indian tribes, now full of fair promises, were allowed to take up their abode on their reservations without further guarding. General Custer, with the Seventh United States Regiment, and Colonel Horace L. Moore, in full command of the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry, were directed to reach the Cheyenne tribe and reduce it to submission.