Indians seldom leave their dead on the field of battle, but the blood-stained sod beside their fallen ponies told a story of heavy toll. Blood marked the trail of hoofprints to the northwest in their wild rout thither. One comrade they had missed in their flight. He lay down near the river where the ground had been threshed over by the stampeded stock. He must have been a giant in life, for his was the longest grave made in the prairie sod that day. At the river's edge the sands were pricked with hoofprints, where the struggle to carry away the dead seemed to have reached clear into the thin yellow current of the Arkansas, although no trail led out on the far side of the stream. "That's the very copper cuss with yellow trimmings who had me down when that arrow stopped me," Beverly exclaimed. "He was seven feet tall and streaked with yellow just that way. I thought ten million rattlesnakes and eight billion polecats had hit me. His club was awful. Then I caught sight of old Gail's face in the dust-storm, coming back to help me. He gave the Indian one dose and got one back, a good hard bill, and then the dust closed in and Gail was off again to the northwest out there, like a hurricane. I could hear him a mile away. Couldn't I Gail? Where is Gail?" Where? "Oh, back there with the stock!" No? "Out there looking over the draw for things that's got all scattered." No? Not there? "Oh, he's getting breakfast. And we are all hungry enough to eat raw Kiowas now." No? No? "Gail would be helping the wounded, anyhow, or straightening out dead men's limbs. Poor fellows--to lose six! It's awful!" No? No? No? "Bathing in the river? Where? Over there across the sand-bar?" Nowhere! Nowhere! "By the eternal God, they've got him!" Jondo's agonized voice rang through the camp. "We can take care of the wounded, and those fellows lying over there don't need us. But, oh, Gail! They'll torture him to death!" Rex Krane's voice choked and he ground his teeth. "Gail, my Gail!" Beverly sat down white and desparingly calm--Beverly, whose up-bubbling spirits nobody could repress. The others wrung their hands and cursed and groaned aloud. Only Bill Banney, the unimaginative and stern-hearted, stood motionless with set jaws and black-frowning brows. Bill, whom the plains had made hard and unfeeling. "We won't give up Gail, will we, Bill?" Jondo spoke sternly, but his face--they said his face was bright with courage and that his eyes shone with the inspiration of his will. In all that crowd of eager, faithful men, he turned now to Bill Banney. Every man had his place on the plains, and Jondo out of the chrism of his own life-struggle knew that Bill was bearing a cross in silence, and that his was the martyr spirit that finds salvation only in deeds. Bill was the man for the place.