and scattered after their old fashion. But fortunately it was not so.

The companies of infantry, one picket covering an overhanging ledge south and east of the agency, were a sufficiency, yes, probably a bait, that drew to them the searching eyes and cautious approach of the enemy. The fires for breakfast and coffee, had hardly been lighted when the pickets descried the Piutes and Bannocks coming toward them rapidly, in considerable force. How often I have experienced just that state of things, - where excitement has temporarily removed all appetite for food. There is a story of the Rebellion to the effect that a famous Union regiment was making coffee, when the cry that the enemy were coming hindered them from their favorite morning drink. The men of the regiment were so angry at the interruption, that they seized. their arms and charging over their works remorselessly defeated their foes. In some such way was it here at the Umatilla, for without waiting a moment, Miles deployed his forces; Rodney's companies on the left and facing southward, while six companies drew a semi-circular line from Rodney's position westward. Putting Bendire's cavalry out in the extreme left, Miles held his remaining companies of the 21st Infantry in rear in reserve.

The reserve guarded the wagon train and the pack mules, which were parked and held in a ravine out of the track of immediate danger. Miles had two small howitzers which he brought into action a little to the left of his centre, where two of his companies in the line could watch them and care for them in case of need. The Indians as usual with them stopped beyond the field of immediate danger. They ran into the crooked ravines and covered themselves as completely as they could, in fact behaved naturally, as our skirmishers are supposed to behave. The difference is, that if you call out to our men, "There is the enemy!” nearly every individual soldier will spring up.

or jump upon a log, if there is one near, to see his opponent, while the Indians under like circumstances always remain motionless or hide more profoundly. From their hidhiding places the Snakes fired irregularly, and though they occasionally ran to new places for better sight or range, still it was difficult for Miles's men to find anything to fire at except the occasional puffs of smoke. Still this kind of fighting lasted a wonderfully long time and much ammunition was expended, especially on our side, till about two o'clock in the afternoon. Then Miles ordered Rodney to gain ground by his left to the east, and if possible sweep out the ravine that his men were facing. At once, probably tired of bootless firing, his men sprang forward with enthusiasm and promptly set the enemy in motion, as Miles at the same time charged along his entire curvilinear front. This seems to have been unexpected by Chief Egan, for he was still commanding the Snakes in this his last battle. So away his Indians ran mounted on their swift ponies over the foothills and the mountain, pursued by the excited white men, who seemed to have thought of neither breakfast nor dinner, till with the utmost rapidity they had chased them at least three miles into the mountains.

When the exciting day began to wane, and Miles saw his men showing plain signs of exhaustion from want of rest and food, he halted and went into camp on the spot, expecting to take up the pursuit the next morning. But my friend, Connoyer, who had gone back to his home at the agency, for once was over excited. Though the hostiles had fled and were running away into the mountains southward and eastward as fast as their hardy ponies could carry them, and had been pursued for several hours by Miles's eager men; though the troops, cavalry and fantry, were between the enemies and the peaceable Indians, and there was no likelihood of their return that night, particularly after their long and exhausting battle; still, Con

noyer sent a hurried dispatch to Miles, which he received about eight p. m., just after the weary men had begun their much needed sleep.

It was to the effect that he, Connoyer, had received information to which he gave credit, that the hostile Indians would return that very night and burn down all the buildings of the agency, and that they proposed to drive off the large herd of Indian horses or other stock which was pastured on the Umatilla reservation. Connoyer begged for the immediate return of the troops. These astonishing reports with the urgent request were doubtless manufactured by the same cunning people who knew when to betray, when to be neutral, and when, in the interest of their beaten friends, according to their Indian notions, to lie. Some one asked me only yesterday if Indians were not habitually treacherous. I answered, "No, not generally."

After a long experience with them and intercourse with perhaps a hundred tribes, I have found on trial that Indians have habitually kept their word with me. There have been during war a few notable exceptions to this rule. Still as in war every leader of an independent force, and every one loyal to that leader's movements, undertakes to deceive and mislead an enemy in arms, so do the Indians. The Indians, all Indians in fact, own that when Indians are "mad" they go to war. When they go to war, they deceive, kill, scalp, rob, burn, destroy, and appropriate, beating all white men in atrocities and horrors.

Captain Miles, as Boulanger said about the severities at West Point, exercised command "sans pitié,". either the long roll sounded, or more likely, captains, lieutenants, and non-commissioned officers crept quietly around and wakened every man. Silently but hurriedly they marched back. over their battle-field and were soon at the

agency. The commander here put everything in the posture of defense. But there

was no need; for as he with dignified simplicity remarks: " No attempt was made by the enemy in this direction, they being too demoralized by the result of the day to make any demonstration but the continuation of their precipitate retreat.".

"But," says some military man,- we know that many such are wise after the battle,-"how came it that Captain Miles did not also have somebody follow up that demoralized foe ?" Well, he did so. Some of those neutral Indians began to think of their future, and some others doubtless hated to be suspected of double dealing. These came that night through their headmen, in the language of Miles, "with offers to confirm their protestations of friendship by sending a number of warriors to cooperate with my command." This was fine; it was well timed. Miles at once closed in with the overtures,— and Indian-like, without waiting for any positive directions, the savage allies set out on fresh horses to take up the pursuit. The reader will pardon me for giving the results of this pursuit and of the blind contest which took place somewhere in the dense forest of the Blue Ridge in the very words of Captain Miles himself :

"The prompt and energetic action of this small band of allies was not, however, barren of good results, as on the 15th instant they returned to my camp, having attacked the fleeing hostiles successfully, as evidenced by their captured trophies, which consisted among others of seven warriors' scalps, one of which was subsequently proved to be that of the Piute chief, Egan."

The real leader of the allies had hitherto passed among the Piutes as their special friend. The Indians called him "Umapine." He was about six feet in height, of large, closely knit frame, broad shouldered, and thick chested; and when not on the warpath he had a friendly eye of good size and a not unpleasant smile, yet the impression he gave you was of a predominant animal nature. When he ate he consumed

twice as much as the other strong men ; yet doubtless when he fasted he could go long without eating. When he undertook war he displayed a profound treachery, and when he killed he made it murder. Even his mates shuddered at his brutality, and his enemies hated him relentlessly. Yet after the wicked act he strutted in pride and fine feathers and boasted of his prowess.

It was this leader, Uma-pine, whom the Piutes and Bannocks had leaned upon as a friend, who now a secret foe, with his swiftest followers overtook Egan and his beaten host. He brought back in the morning to Captain Miles and to General Wheaton, who had just reached the agency, the signs of his terrible work.

Truly such allies make one shudder anew at the horrors of Indian warfare. The old chief Winnemucca, Natchez, and Sarah, were affected to tears by the loss of their old friends. They never could get over the shock that the stories of the murder of Egan and his companions produced upon them.

Many women prisoners, some of them young girls were taken from the Piutes at the same time and kept in Indian fashion by Uma-pine and his Indians. Natchez's talk to the Umatillas in subsequent council is significant: "If we had made war with you and you had taken us in battle, we would not say anything; but you helped the thing along and for four years you have come on the Malheur reservation (Egan's place), and told Egan and Oytes to make war against the whites. You have called them fools to stay on the reservation and starve; and another thing, you have helped the Bannocks to fight the soldiers. My friends, it must be a beautiful sensation to cut a man or woman to pieces, and then skin their heads and fasten them on a pole, and dance around them as if you were indeed very happy." [See Hopkin's "Life among Piutes," pages 191-192.]

It was believed by our officers that all the wounded and many of the dead were carried off the field by the Bannocks during

the day's battle. Five bodies of the warriors, however, but no wounded, were found there after the conflict. Miles, strange to say, for the Indians are usually good marksmen, had none killed on his side and bu: few wounded. At this time the Indians attempted to shoot at too great a distance. He gives special credit to a small company of citizen volunteers who came out from the pretty village of Pendleton, to help him in his assaults. He commended them particularly for their diligent conduct as skirmishers and flankers.

So much for what we have named "Miles's Engagement." Engagement." It was, bating the position, much like Birch Creek, a brisk, animated combat and then a chase. The Bannocks and Piutes by running, scattering, and hiding, and then continuing their retreat in small, separate companies, succeeded in prolonging the tedious compaign, and in spreading terror anew among the small villages and hamlets threatened with a wild visitation by the new routes which they chose.

Major E. C. Mason, whom I left behind at the Cayuse Station, gives in his report a brief summary of the events just related. It is the way important history is always at last condensed. He writes: "Turning now towards the Umatilla reservation, they [the hostile Indians] are met by the artillery, infantry, and one company of cavalry, under command of Captain Evan Miles, and again defeated and scattered. All the approaches to the Columbia and Snake Rivers are closed

ke cranberry harvesters, comb down" e entire field. This fatiguing work had vo objects, first to defeat, or bring in the dians as prisoners, and second, to allay

if possible the wild fears of ranch people and inhabitants of small hamlets, who could never feel sure of protection, till they saw the troops.

0. O. Howard.

I HAVE returned to Baltimore after an bsence of twenty years and on this first evening in my old home, am thinking of a listant kinsman who has long been dead. So insistent is the memory, that as I stood a moment since looking out into the rainy dusk, it almost seemed as if he too must soon be among the men who are passing through the rays of red and green light streaming from the apothecary's window opposite.

He was a tall, somber person whom the negroes held in awe as one likely to practice black arts on those who aroused his wrath. I used often to listen to the talk of a rheumatic old negress, with fingers as knotted and twisted as roots, who believed herself to have been "cunjured" by him. As he stalked past her door, where she was in the habit of sunning herself, she would shrink together until she seemed scarcely more than a bundle of rags, then gradually uncurling herself as his footsteps died away in the distance, would sit chattering with anger, muttering the curses she had not dared to let him hear, long after he was out of sight. Yet I believe David Todd never knew of her existence; for he went his way among his fellows, lost in baffled, groping thought, as if none of them had enough affinity for him to draw his eyes outward from the thoughts that held him.

He was of a good Quaker family and for years filled the chair of natural his

tory in the of college of X. At length, however, there began to be queer rumors concerning him. It was said that he fancied he had discovered the origin of life, and bending over his crucibles attempted the role of creator. But whatever town talk might invent concerning him, no one really knew much about his affairs; for he had always been a taciturn man, and now developed an irascible, suspicious manner toward his old associates that led them to avoid him; and before long he himself plunged into a preoccupation that seemed to blot out from his mind all consciousness of his neighbors.

His work, whatever it might be, bound him, it was said, to unremitting toil; but as time went on without the result of his labors appearing, the world which he had forgotten in turn forgot him, or nearly so. The negroes, who had probably originally gathered the idea of something mysterious about him from the gossip of their masters, still talked of the light always to be seen burning until early morning in the attic of his house; a light which they said proceeded from a candle made of dead men's fat and caused whoever looked long to fall asleep. "Mahs Todd an' de debbie aint got no call to hab folks foolin' 'bout ter see wat dey's at," they explained; and this idea of his crooked ways was carefully strengthened by an old aunty who lived under his roof, and who was not a little proud of the league her

master was understood to have with the evil one, although she weekly showed the working of divine grace in herself by jumping and shouting in "meetin'," and moreover, had been immersed in order that she might be quite sure that no taint of original sin adhered to her.

She possessed considerable skill in herbs and was to boot a shrewd old body, quick to use her master's supposed powers as a means of increasing her reputation for knowingness. But in spite of the liberties she took with his name, no one at bottom believed more in his arts than Aunt Kitty. His gloomy, abstracted ways awed her; and although nothing extraordinary ever happened in the house, her imagination, like an orchid, seemed to find enough in the air to keep it flourishing.

The one other inmate of the house gave no such play to her fancy. David Todd's sister, Rachel, was a slight, timid, and rather deaf little woman, whom indoor life had made pale, and her occupations were perfectly simple and evident. Setting neat stitches seemed to be the form duty had taken to her, and tending a few window plants and reading her Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost made the sum of her pleasure. Poor Rachel, she had been the last child born in the house, and it had been her lot to see the gradual disintegration of the family, and to stand at last in silent rooms where laughter on her lips would have seemed ghostly to her, even if the years, which had taken so much away from her, had not at last stripped her of her original small stock of buoyancy. Living in the dim rooms she had grown almost as quiescent as the moths that now and then finding their way into the house from the masses of Virginia creeper about the windows, lay motionless at the bottom of the panes.

Five years before the date of our story she had been thrown into the greatest flutter of her life by having an orphan niece placed under her charge until the rigors of a New

itor was a radiant girl with golden-brow eyes and bright yellow hair, in whose so masses an amber comb often shone. 'Rachel hovered about her in an ecstasy of admintion, and was the most submissive elder that ever a wayward girl undertook to manage; and indeed, not only she and the willful Aunt Kitty came under Ethel's sway. but even David lost some of his usual inattention to what was going on in the house and showed a grim pleasure in the girl's coaxing ways.

The cheerful days went by so quickly that it seemed to Rachel as if there had neve: been a year when the dandelions came so soon; and before any of the three older people were willing to think of Ethel's departure she began to talk blithely of her return north.

She was so happy in the thought of her approaching marriage that she left them almost without a pang. But some years later, when the world had taken on a sadder hue to her, she thought of them often. And when she felt her hold on life slipping from

her grasp, the memory of Rachel's past

tenderness gave her courage to write to her asking her love for a little Ethel, not quite two years old, in case of her own death; for five years of married life had left Ethel worse than widowed.

Thus it happened one stormy November evening that Rachel watched for her brother's return from a journey he had made to Boston to bring home a little guest; and she looked again and again at the photograph of the pretty child, standing on the mantel, telling herself that it was just Ethel over again.

For many months past David had been more preoccupied than ever. He was no longer seen abroad, and even Rachel ate her meals alone and never saw his gant form except when, hunger reminding him of his long fast, he descended from his laboratory to Aunt Kitty's domain. But when Rachel,