Daddy Keeler pumped doggedly, and never raised his head; the creaking of the pump-handle matched with the low howling of the frightened dog. Daddy Keeler’s sombrero went whirling, the dog was shot down at his feet; still he pumped on. The bucket at last was filled. Daddy Keeler picked up his hat and fixed it on his head. Then he brought the bucket and passed it through the opening without spilling a drop. The next moment he had followed it, and never a mark upon him. “It’s some hot out thar in the sun,” said Daddy Keeler, apologetically, wiping the great drops from his forehead. Then taking off his sombrero, and considering the double hole the bullet had left: “It was a forty-four did that; some of ’em’s shootin’ Winchesters.” For fourteen long, hot days the fight went on; now and then a charge, more often long-range shooting, whereat the buffalo hunters excelled. When the fight flagged the garrison played poker, leaving one to watch. Every night one-half the garrison must dig graves for the dead—pony and Indian alike. The argument for these sexton labours was sanitary, not sentimental. In the blinding height of a Panhandle summer it is no good thing to be cordoned about with dead ponies and dead Indians. There was never a danger; your savage lies close, and will not move in the dark unless one crowd him. He is so much the Parthian that it is against his religion to fight in the night. Before the burial parties tumbled an Indian into his sepulchre, they were at pains to have his scalp as an incontestable method of keeping accounts. On the fifteenth day, when the troops from Dodge relieved the siege, there were eighty topknots to tell the loss of the enemy. Inez, when the fighting fell to long-range, cried to be lifted from her box. Inez did not fear bullets; arrows were a different commodity and set her nerves on edge. She could see them; besides, they smelled fearfully of Indians. As long as no arrow came spitting and splintering through the openings, Inez was without a care. She would have been content were it not for her rations of merely bread and water. This she thought squinted at parsimony, and it aroused her spleen. When the cavalry came riding down from Dodge the beaten remnant of that war party went squattering through the shallow reaches of the Canadian, and headed south for the Staked Plains. Then the visiting Osages and Pawnees, pipe in hand and blankets wrapped about them, came beamingly from their audience hill to offer congratulations. “How!” said Black Feather, the Osage chief, extending his hand to Mr. Wright “How! Heep big fight!” Then Black Feather went over the four score scalps, and whether by tint of plume or mark of braid, hidden to the white man, confidently told the tribe of each. “Comanche!” grunted Black Feather, picking up a scalp; and then: “Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arrapahoe,” as he pawed the others over one by one. “Who were right in this shindy?” asked the captain of cavalry.