THE ATTACK Slightly more than sixty miles, as the route ran, stretched between old Fort Dodge and the ford crossing the Arkansas leading down to the Cimarron; another sixty miles distant, across a desert of alkali and sand, lay Devere.

The main Santa Fe trail, broad and deeply rutted by the innumerable wheels of early spring caravans, followed the general course of the river, occasionally touching the higher level plains, but mostly keeping close beneath the protection of the northern bluffs, or else skirting the edge of the water.

Night or day the route was easily followed, and, in other years, the traveller was seldom for long out of sight of toiling wagons.

Now scarcely a wheel turned in all that lonely distance.
The west-bound stage left the station at Deer Creek at four o'clock in the afternoon with no intimation of danger ahead.

Its occupants had eaten dinner in company with those of the east-bound coach, eighteen miles down the river at Canon Bluff, and the in-coming driver had reported an open road, and no unusual trouble.