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can be seen a long way off. If there was an Indian near you’d have lost your scalp.”
    Mellett moved on, going back through the junipers to camp. Before Mellett had his boots off, Private Thomas had lighted a cigarette. “Damned old fool!” he muttered. “That’s Army for you!”
    Red Wolf was a young warrior who had yet to take his first scalp. He had been lying under a low clump of sagebrush for more than an hour, and he had watched the glow of a cigarette. Almost ready to make his move, he had heard somebody approach, and had listened to the low murmur of voices. There was now no lighted cigarette to give him the exact location of the man he intended to kill.
    He waited again as he had waited before. After several minutes the glow of the cigarette appeared again. Lifting his bow, he put an arrow in place, waited an instant, and let his breath out easily. Then suddenly he lifted the bow and shot the arrow.
    He heard the thud of the arrow, and was moving before the man fell. His fingers touched the guard’s cheek, then seized his hair; but as the knife cut into the skin, the body beneath him convulsed suddenly and hands clawed up at him. He stabbed wildly and in a panic; once, twice, three times he thrust the knife deep, and only after the struggles ceased did he again go about removing the scalp.
    Once that was done, he stripped the body, took up the rifle and belt, and moved quickly and quietly away. Half a mile away his horse waited, tied in the deepest part of a thicket. He had been gone for an hour before the corporal of the guard found the dead man.
    “Bury his cigarette butts with him,” Dunivant said the next morning. “If I told him once, I told him twenty times.”

 
     
    Chapter 5
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    T HERE WAS NO set pattern for the layout of a frontier army post. Only the earliest ones possessed any kind of a stockade. There was a central parade ground with the various buildings grouped about it to form a rectangle. Outside this, as if looking over the shoulders of the inner buildings, were others, in no sort of formation. Further away, about five hundred yards in this case, was Hog Town, as it was called.
    Along one side of the parade ground were the officers’ quarters, a row of frame, stone, or adobe houses that faced the enlisted men’s barracks across the way. At the north end, Headquarters, a T-shaped building of stone, looked down the length of the parade ground. To the east was the commissary storehouse, also built of stone; to the west the hospital.
    At the south of the parade ground was the long, low store of the sutler, or post trader; behind this the stables, corrals, and hay corrals. Behind the barracks were the blacksmith shop, laundry, and a varied assortment of small buildings.
    There was always a Hog Town at all the camps on the frontier. There a soldier could find whatever he wanted—women, gambling, and whiskey predominating. Operating the Hog Town here was Iron Dave Sproul, a man whose reputation had started far back along the line. Iron Dave was big, tough, and mean. He had operated such places in a dozen towns before this.
    Iron Dave had come off the streets of lower New York, had served a rugged apprenticeship as a prize fighter of sorts, a gang fighter and strong-arm man before coming west to what promised to be richer fields. As a boy in the streets he had had opportunities to study the origins of power, and more than that, the applications of power. He had also learned that more money was to be had, and less risk, by managing the fighter rather than fighting himself.
    At first he ran gambling houses and saloons, then owned some of each; but what he was looking for was the right man. What he wanted was a man through whom he could make money; and secondly, a man who would be a means to political power. He believed he had found both.
    Iron Dave, so-called because of his iron-hard fists, knew five Indian dialects and was an expert at sign language. He needed no interpreter in talking