We are now having dress parade every night, Sunday excepted.
Monday was pay day here and the guardhouse is taking in its usual number of disdorderlies.
General Kautz went away on business last week and Lieut. Col. Smith takes command until his return.
The new boarding house is completed. A few of the tradesmen have arrived and the buildings have been commenced in earnest.
The most troublesome things here are the knats which walk all over a man and defy you to capSture them. You can kill a mosquito, which is a consolation itself, but a knat seems to have come into existence to keep the art of swearing from dying out.
More of the fugitive settlers came in to the fort on Sunday, with the same story of the anticipated Indian raid. Many of them look toil-worn and poor. The crops which they seem to be most successful in raising, do not enrich them any—those are crops of children. The quartermaster issued a few tents to shelter their families but the settlers left the next day on learning that there was nothing in the scare.