Select the sentence that BEST conveys the central idea of the text to the reader. In direct, quiet words-words whose bareness made them dramatic for the weight of possibility they.
carried—the Colonel explained. Black Wolf and his band were out on the war-path. A soldier
coming in wounded, escaped from the massacre of the post at Devil's Hoof Gap, had reported it.
With the large command known to be here camped on Sweetstream Fork, they would not come this
way; they would swerve up the Gunpowder River twenty miles away, destroying the settlement and
Little Fort Slade, and would sweep on, probably for a general massacre, up the Great Horn as far as
Fort Doncaster. He himself, with the regiment, would try to save Fort Slade, but in the meantime
Captain Thornton's troop, coming to join him, ignorant that Black Wolf had taken the war-path, would
be directly in their track. Some one must be sent to warn them, and of course the fewer the quicker.
Lieutenant Morgan would take a sergeant, the Colonel ordered quietly, and start at once.