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that gleaming knife made a strange exciting
tableau.

Another ex-scout, known as Curly Walker,
was killed near Dodge by a resident of Salina,
Kas., in an encounter resulting from an effort
on the part of Walker to sell a lot of cattle
stolen and runoff by him from their lawful
owner. This man Walker has cowed once
when drunk and disorderly at Fort Dodge in
a way that Lieut.-Col. John R. Brooke is too
modest to tell about. Bob Wright was present
when he was killed. He was pierced by
several bullets from a Winchester rifle whilst
dismounting from his horse, and died with
one hand on his revolver vainly struggling to
release it from the holster in the stitching
of which the hammer was caught. In the
other hand "Curly" Walker had a revolver,
which, in his death throes, he used as a knife,
repeatedly thrusting it into the prairie sod,
discharging it and bursting the weapon by the
act.

Another of the scouts was a man of education
from Philadelphia and the nephew of an
ex-Union soldier, at one time the postmaster
of St. Louis. His fate is unknown.

Scout O. J. Whitman was found dead on
the plains, his head resting in his saddle, used
as a pillow, his horse and arms gone--scalped
--an arrow through his heart. He was killed
while asleep.

If these lines are read by any survivors of
the fight of Aug. 17, 18, 19, and 20, 1868, on the
Arrickeree Fork of the Republican River,
Kansas, the place where Lieut. Beecher was
killed, he or they will remember Malcolm
Graham as one of the men who ran the gantlet
of the Indians surrounding that island in
the river and made his way unwounded to
Gen. Bankhead at Fort Wallace, thus securing
relief for the Forsyth party. Graham was
one of the scouts under John Austin at Fort
Dodge and did good service in that capacity.

Capt. Harry Reade, who for eighteen years
was an officer of the Twenty-fifth United
States Infantry, was formerly a scout in government
service upon the Western plains.
He never wore a buckskin suit or affected
long hair, however, and in the quiet retirement
of his Massachusetts home knows not
the perils of the days when he, with only a
single companion scout, carried dispatches
through a region populous with Kiowa, Arapahoe,
and Cheyenne Indians, who ambushed
the watering places, fired the river bottoms,
and whose keen-eyed abilities sought by every
artifice and skillful device to intercept, chase
down, and kill the government scouts.