While on their mission the boys talked over the story of the massacre, Joe explaining many things in connection with the savage method of making a raid on a white settlement. Those were things which Rob did not fully understand, but with which Joe was familiar, having been told all about them by the friendly Pawnees. He told Rob that he was crazy to go on the little expedition, but did not dare ask permission. "Father might be willing, maybe," suggested Rob, "though I'm sure that mother and the girls would object." "I'll bet that I can find the trail of the Cheyennes, for I know better than any one who is going along, that they were Cheyennes who made the attack," said Joe. "That man who came down with the news don't know much about Indians; I could tell that by the way he talked; he's a 'tender-foot.' He admitted to papa he'd only been in the country a very short time." "By jolly! I'll bet he was scared when he saw those Indians," said Rob; "he wasn't used to such sights!" "How he must have ridden his horse," said Joe. "I never saw an animal so frothy in my life before; did you, Rob? You could have scraped a wash-tub of lather off him!" "If the Cheyennes have left any kind of a trail after them, I can tell just how many there were of them," continued Joe, "but they are ahead of all other Indians in covering up their tracks; old Yellow Calf has told me so a dozen times. I expect that it was Charley Bent's band of Dog soldiers that made the raid." "What are Dog soldiers?" inquired Rob. "Why, the young bucks of a tribe who will not obey the orders of their chief; renegades who will not be controlled by any custom. Those Indians who have not done anything yet to make them warriors, and who go off on their own hook to murder and steal, and to fire the cabins of the poor settlers, thinking that if they can get a few scalps of women and children they will be recognized by the rest of the tribe as braves. Sometimes there are 'Squaw-men' among them, that is, white men who have married Indian women; generally bad men who have committed some crime where they used to live and dare not go back to where they came from." "Who is Charley Bent?" asked Rob. "That is not an Indian name, surely!" "I know it isn't," answered Joe. "He's a half breed; half white and half Cheyenne. His mother was a Cheyenne squaw, and his father was Colonel Bent, one of the most celebrated frontiersmen of his time. Charley was well educated in St. Louis, but when he returned to his father's home, at Bent's Fort, way up the Arkansas River, in what is now Colorado, he threw off the white man's dress and manner of living, joined the Indians, and became, in his devilishness, the worst savage to be found in the whole Indian country. The United States Government has offered a thousand dollars for him, dead or alive. Somebody will catch him yet; the army scouts are after him red hot, so the Pawnees told me."