There was yet no key to the Cottage bar when there came the unbelievable word that there was no longer a buffalo to be found anywhere on the range, and that the Indians were gone, beaten, herded up forever. Far to the north, it was declared, there were men coming in on the cow range who had silver-mounted guns, who wore gold and jewels, and who brought with them saddles without horns! It was said, however, that these new men wanted to buy cows, so cows were taken to them. Many young men of Mother Daly's family went on up the Trail, never to come back to Ellisville, and it was said that they were paid much gold, and that they stole many cows from the men who had silver-mounted guns, and who wore strange, long knives, with which it was difficult to open a tin can.

Mother Daly looked upon this, and it was well. She understood her old boys and loved them. She was glad the world was full of them. It was a busy, happy, active world, full of bold deeds, full of wide plans, full of men. She looked out over the wide wind-swept plains, along the big chutes full of bellowing beeves, at the wide corral with its scores of saddled Nemeses, and she was calm and happy. It was a goodly world.

It was upon one day that Mother Daly looked out upon her world; upon the next day she looked again, and all the world was changed. Far as the eye could reach, the long and dusty roadway of the cows lay silent, with its dust unstirred. Far, very far off, there was approaching a little band of strange, small, bleating, woolly creatures, to whose driver Mother Daly refused bed and board. The cattle chutes were silent, the corral was empty. At the Cottage bar the keeper had at last found a key to the door. Up and down the Trail, east and west of the Trail, all was quiet, bare, and desolate. At some signal—some signal written on the sky—all the old life of Ellisville had taken up its journey into a farther land, into another day. The cowman, the railroad man, and the gambling man had gone, leaving behind them the wide and well-perforated Cottage, the graveyard with its double street, the cattle chutes with well-worn, hairy walls.

Now there came upon the face of the country faint scars where wheels had cut into the hard soil, these vagrant indices of travel not pointing all one way, and not cut deep, as was the royal highway of the cattle, but crossing, tangling, sometimes blending into main-travelled roads, though more often straying aimlessly off over the prairie to end at the homestead of some farmer. The smokes arose more numerously over the country, and the low houses of the settlers were seen here and there on either hand by those who drove out over the winding wagon ways in search of land. These new houses were dark and low and brown, with the exception that each few miles the traveller might see a small frame house painted white. Sometimes, in the early morning, there might be seen wandering toward these small white houses, no man knew whence, small groups of little beings never before seen upon the range. At nightfall they wandered back again. Sometimes, though rarely, they needed to turn aside from the straight line to go about the corner of a fence. Sometimes within such fences there might be seen others of these dirty, bleating creatures which Mother Daly hated. Here and there over the country were broken rows of little yellow, faded trees struggling up out of the hard earth. The untiring wheels of windmills could be seen everywhere at their work.

Here and there at the trodden, water holes of the broken creeks there lay carcasses of perished cattle, the skin dried and drawn tight over the bones; but on the hillsides near by grazed living cattle, fatter and more content to feed than the wild creatures that yesterday clacked and crowded up the Trail. Now, it is known of all men that cattle have wide horns, broad as the span of a man's arms; yet there were men here who said they had seen cattle whose horns were no longer than those of the buffalo, and later this thing was proved to be true.

Mother Daly knew, as all persons in the past knew, that by right the face of the plains was of one colour, unbroken; gray-brown in summer, white in winter, green in the spring. Yet now, as though giants would play here some game of draughts, there came a change upon the country, so that in squares it was gray, in squares green. This thing had never been before.

In the town of Ellisville the great heap of buffalo bones was gone from the side of the railroad track. There were many wagons now, but none brought in bones to pile up by the railway; for even the bones of the buffalo were now gone forever.

Mother Daly looked out upon the Cottage corral one day, and saw it sound and strong. Again she looked, and the bars were gone. Yet another day she looked, and there was no corral! Along the street, at the edge of the sidewalks of boards, there stood a long line of hitching rails. Back of these board sidewalks were merchants who lived in houses with green blinds, and they pronounced that word "korrawl!"

The livery barn of Samuel Poston grew a story in stature, and there was such a thing as hay—hay not imported in wired bales. In the little city there were three buildings with bells above them. There was a courthouse of many rooms; for Ellisville had stolen the county records from Strong City, and had held them through Armageddon. There were large chutes now at the railway, not for cattle, but for coal. Strange things appeared. There was a wide, low, round, red house, full of car tracks, and smoke, and hammer blows, and dirt, and confusion; and from these shops came and went men who did an unheard-of thing. They worked eight hours a day, no more, no less! Now, in the time of Man, men worked twenty-four hours a day, or not at all; and they did no man's bidding.

The streets of Ellisville were many. They doubled and crossed. There was a public square hedged about with trees artificially large. For each vanishing saloon there had come a store with its hitching rack for teams. The Land Office was yet at Ellisville, and the rush of settlers was continuous. The men who came out from the East wore wide hats and carried little guns; but when they found the men of Ellisville wearing small, dark hats and carrying no guns at all, they saw that which was not to be believed, and which was, therefore, not so written in the literary centres which told the world about the Ellisvilles. Strangers asked Ellisville about the days of the cattle drive, and Ellisville raised its eminently respectable eyebrows. There was a faint memory of such a time, but it was long, long ago. Two years ago! All the world had changed since then. There had perhaps been a Cottage Hotel. There was perhaps a Mrs. Daly, who conducted a boarding-house, on a back street. Our best people, however, lived at the Stone Hotel. There were twelve lawyers who resided at this hotel, likewise two ministers and their wives. Six of the lawyers would bring out their wives the following spring. Ministers, of course, usually took their wives with them.

Ellisville had thirty business houses and two thousand inhabitants. It had large railway shops and the division offices of the road. It had two schoolhouses (always the schoolhouse grew quickly on the Western soil), six buildings of two stories, two buildings of three stories and built of brick. Business lots were worth $1,800 to $2,500 each. The First National Bank paid $4,000 for its corner. The Kansas City and New England Loan, Trust, and Investment Company had expended $30,000 in cash on its lot, building, and office fixtures. It had loaned three quarters of a million of dollars in and about Ellisville.

Always the land offered something to the settler. The buffalo being gone, and their bones being also gone, some farmers fell to trapping and poisoning the great gray wolves, bringing in large bales of the hides. One farmer bought half a section of land with wolf skins. He had money enough left to buy a few head of cattle and to build a line of fence. This fence cut at right angles a strange, wide, dusty pathway. The farmer did not know what he had done. He had put restraint on that which in its day knew no pause and brooked no hindrance. He had set metes and bounds across the track where once rolled the wheels of destiny. He had set the first fence across the Trail!

The stranger who asked for the old, wild days of Ellisville the Red was told that no such days had ever been. Yet stay: perhaps there were half a dozen men who had lived at Ellisville from the first who could, perhaps, take one to the boarding-house of Mrs. Daly; who could, perhaps, tell something of the forgotten days of the past, the days of two years ago, before the present population of Ellisville came West. There was, perhaps, a graveyard, but the headstones had been so few that one could tell but little of it now. Much of this, no doubt, was exaggeration, this talk of a graveyard, of a doubled street, of murders, of the legal killings which served as arrests, of the lynchings which once passed as justice. There was a crude story of the first court ever held in Ellisville, but of course it was mere libel to say that it was held in the livery barn. Rumour said that the trial was over the case of a negro, or Mexican, or Indian, who had been charged with murder, and who was himself killed in an attempt at lynching, by whose hand it was never known. These things were remembered or talked about by but very few, these the old-timers, the settlers of two years ago. Somewhere to the north of the town, and in the centre of what was declared by some persons to be the old cattle trail, there was reputed to be visible a granite boulder, or perhaps it was a granite shaft, supposed to have been erected with money contributed by cattlemen at the request of Mrs. Daly, who kept the boarding-house on a back street. Some one had seen this monument, and brought back word that it had cut upon its face a singular inscription, namely:

JUAN THE LOCO,

THE END OF THE TRAIL.



CHAPTER XXXI

THE SUCCESS OF BATTERSLEIGH

One morning when Franklin entered his office he found his friend Battersleigh there before him, in full possession, and apparently at peace with all the world. His tall figure was reclining in an office chair, and his feet were supported by the corner of the table, in an attitude which is called American, but which is really only masculine, and quite rational though unbeautiful. Battersleigh's cloak had a swagger in its very back, and his hat sat at a cocky angle not to be denied. He did not hear Franklin as he approached the door, and the latter stood looking in for a moment, amused at Battersleigh and his attitude and his song. When quite happy Battersleigh always sang, and very often his song was the one he was singing now, done in a low nasal, each verse ending, after the vocal fashion of his race, with a sudden uplift of a sheer octave, as thus:

"I-I-I-'d dance li-i-i-ke a fa-a-a-iree-ee-ee, For to see ould Dunlear-e-e-e-e-e! I-I-I-'d think twi-i-i-ice e-e-e-r-r I-I-I-'d lave it, For to be-e-e-e-e a drag-o-o-n."

Franklin chuckled at the reminiscent music as he stepped in and said good morning. "You seem in fine fettle this morning, friend," said he. "Very fine, for an old man."

Battersleigh squared around and looked at him soberly. "Ned," said he, "ye're a dethractor of innycince. Batty ould! Listen to me, boy! It's fifty years younger I am to-day than when I saw ye last. I'm younger than ye ivver saw me in all your life before."

"And what and where was the fountain?" said Franklin, as he seated himself at his desk.

"The one fountain of all on earth, me boy—Succiss—succiss! The two dearest things of life are Succiss and Revinge. I've found thim both. Shure, pfwhat is that gives one man the lofty air an' the overlookin' eye, where another full his ekil in inches fears to draw the same breath o' life with him? Succiss, succiss, me boy! Some calls it luck, though most lays it to their own shupayrior merit. For Batty, he lays it to nothin' whativver, but takes it like a philosopher an' a gintleman."

"Well, I suppose you don't mind my congratulating you on your success, whatever it may be," said Franklin, as he began to busy himself about his work at the desk. "You're just a trifle mysterious, you know."

"There's none I'd liever have shake me by the hand than yoursilf, Ned," said Battersleigh, "the more especially by this rayson, that ye've nivver believed in ould Batty at all, but thought him a visionary schamer, an' no more. Didn't ye, now, Ned; on your honour?"

"No," said Franklin stoutly. "I've always known you to be the best fellow in the world."

"Tut, tut!" said Battersleigh. "Ye're dodgin' the issue, boy. But pfwhat wud ye say now, Ned, if I should till ye I'd made over tin thousand pounds of good English money since I came to this little town?"

"I should say," said Franklin calmly, as he opened an envelope, "that you had been dreaming again."

"That's it! That's it!" cried Battersleigh. "Shure ye wud, an' I knew it! But come with me to bank this mornin' an' I'll prove it all to ye."

Something in his voice made Franklin wheel around and look at him. "Oh, do be serious, Battersleigh," said he.

"It's sayrious I am, Ned, I till ye. Luk at me, boy. Do ye not see the years droppin' from me? Succiss! Revinge! Cash! Earth holds no more for Batty. I've thim all, an' I'm contint. This night I retire dhrunk, as a gintleman should be. To-morrow I begin on me wardrobe. I'm goin' a longish journey, lad, back to ould England. I'm a long-lost son, an' thank God! I've not been discovered yit, an' hope I'll not be fer a time.

"I'll till ye a secret, which heretofore I've always neglicted to mintion to anybody. Here I'm Henry Battersleigh, agent of the British-American Colonization Society. On t'other side I might be Cuthbert Allen Wingate-Galt. An' Etcetera, man; etcetera, to God knows what. Don't mintion it, Ned, till I've gone away, fer I've loved the life here so—I've so enjoyed bein' just Batty, agent, and so forth! Belave me, Ned, it's much comfortabler to be merely a' And-so-forth thin it is to be an' Etcetera. An' I've loved ye so, Ned! Ye're the noblest nobleman I ivver knew or ivver expict to know."

Franklin sat gazing at him without speech, and presently Battersleigh went on.

"It's a bit of a story, lad," said he kindly. "Ye see, I've been a poor man all me life, ye may say, though the nephew of one of the richest women in the United Kingdom—an' the stingiest. Instid of doin' her obvayus juty an' supportin' her nephew in becomin' station, she marries a poor little lordlet boy, an' forsakes me entirely. Wasn't it hijjus of her? There may have been raysons satisfyin' to her own mind, but she nivver convinced me that it was Christian conduct on her part. So I wint with the Rile Irish, and fought fer the Widdy. So what with likin' the stir an' at the same time the safety an' comfort o' the wars, an' what with now an' thin a flirtashun in wan colour or another o' the human rainbow, with a bit of sport an' ridin' enough to kape me waist, I've been in the Rile Irish ivver since—whin not somewhere ilse; though mostly, Ned, me boy, stone broke, an' ownin' no more than me bed an' me arms. Ye know this, Ned."

"Yes," said Franklin, "I know, Battersleigh. You've been a proud one,"

"Tut, tut, me boy; nivver mind. Ye'll know I came out here to make me fortune, there bein' no more fightin' daycint enough to engage the attention of a gintleman annywhere upon the globe. I came to make me fortune. An' I've made it. An' I confiss to ye with contrition, Ned, me dear boy, I'm Cubberd Allen Wiggit-Galt, Etcetera !"

After his fashion Franklin sat silent, waiting for the other's speech.

"Ned," said Battersleigh at length, "till me, who's the people of the intire worrld that has the most serane belief in their own shupayriority?"

"New-Yorkers," said Franklin calmly.

"Wrong. Ye mustn't joke, me boy. No. It's the English. Shure, they're the consatedest people in the whole worrld. An' now, thin, who's the wisest people in the worrld?"

"The Americans," said Franklin promptly again.

"Wrong agin. It's thim same d——d domineerin' idjits, the yally-headed subjecks o' the Widdy. An' pfwhy are they wise?"

"You'll have to tell," said Franklin.

"Then I'll till ye. It's because they have a sacra fames fer all the land on earth."

"They're no worse than we," said Franklin. "Look at our Land-Office records here for the past year."

"Yis, the Yankee is a land-lover, but he wants land so that he may live on it, an' he wants to see it before he gives his money for it. Now, ye go to an Englishman, an' till him ye've a bit of land in the cintre of a lost island in the middle of the Pacific say, an' pfwhat does he do? He'll first thry to stale ut, thin thry to bully ye out of ut; but he'll ind by buyin' ut, at anny price ye've conscience to ask, an' he'll thrust to Providence to be able to find the island some day. That's wisdom. I've seen the worrld, me boy, from Injy to the Great American Desert. The Rooshan an' the Frinchman want land, as much land as ye'll cover with a kerchief, but once they get it they're contint. The Haybrew cares for nothin' beyond the edge of his counter. Now, me Angly-Saxon, he's the prettiest fightin' man on earth, an' he's fightin' fer land, er buyin' land, er stalin' land, the livin' day an' cintury on ind. He'll own the earth!"

"No foreign Anglo-Saxon will ever own America," said Franklin grimly.

"Well, I'm tellin' ye he'll be ownin' some o' this land around here."

"I infer, Battersleigh," said Franklin, "that you have made a sale."

"Well, yis. A small matter."

"A quarter-section or so?"

"A quarter-township or so wud be much nearer," said Battersleigh dryly.

"You don't mean it?"

"Shure I do. It's a fool for luck; allowin' Batty's a fool, as ye've always thought, though I've denied it. Now ye know the railroad's crazy for poppylation, an' it can't wait. It fairly offers land free to thim that'll come live on it. It asks the suffrin' pore o' Yurrup to come an' honour us with their prisince. The railroad offers Batty the Fool fifteen hundred acres o' land at three dollars the acre, if Batty the Fool'll bring settlers to it. So I sinds over to me ould Aunt's country—not, ye may suppose, over the signayture o' Cubberd Allen Wiggit-Galt, but as Henry Battersleigh, agent o' the British American Colonization Society—an' I says to the proper party there, says I, 'I've fifteen hundred acres o' the loveliest land that ivver lay out of dures, an' ye may have it for the trifle o' fifty dollars the acre. Offer it to the Leddy Wiggit,' says I to him; 'she's a philanthropist, an' is fer Bettherin' the Pore' ('savin' pore nephews,' says I to mesilf). 'The Lady Wiggit,' says I, ''ll be sendin' a ship load o' pore tinnints over here,' says I, 'an' she'll buy this land. Offer it to her,' says I. So he did. So she did. She tuk it. I'll be away before thim pisints o' hers comes over to settle here, glory be! Now, wasn't it aisy? There's no fools like the English over land, me boy. An' 'twas a simple judgment on me revered Aunt, the Leddy Wiggit."

"But, Battersleigh, look here," said Franklin, "you talk of fifty dollars an acre. That's all nonsense—why, that's robbery. Land is dear here at five dollars an acre."

"Shure it is, Ned," said Battersleigh calmly. "But it's chape in England at fifty dollars."

"Well, but—"

"An' that's not all. I wrote to thim to send me a mere matter of tin dollars an acre, as ivvidence a' good faith. They did so, an' it was most convaynient for settlin' the little bill o' three dollars an acre which the railroad had against me, Batty the Fool."

"It's robbery!" reiterated Franklin.

"It wud 'av' been robbery," said Battersleigh, "had they sint no more than that, for I'd 'av' been defrauded of me just jues. But whut do you think? The murdherin' ould fool, me revered Aunt, the Leddy Wiggit, she grows 'feard there is some intint to rob her of her bargain, so what does she do but sind the entire amount at wance—not knowin', bless me heart an' soul, that she's thus doin' a distinguished kindness to the missin' relative she's long ago forgot! Man, would ye call that robbery? It's Divine Providince, no less! It's justice. I know of no one more deservin' o' such fortune than Battersleigh, late of the Rile Irish, an' now a Citizen o' the World. Gad, but I've a'most a mind to buy a bit of land me own silf, an' marry the Maid o' the Mill, fer the sake o' roundin' out the play. Man, man, it's happy I am to-day!"

"It looks a good deal like taking advantage of another's ignorance," said Franklin argumentatively.

"Sir," said Battersleigh, "it's takin' advantage o' their Wisdom. The land's worth it, as you'll see yoursilf in time. The price is naught. The great fact is that they who own the land own the earth and its people. 'Tis out of the land an' the sea an' the air that all the wilth must come. Thus saith Batty the Fool. Annyhow, the money's in the bank, an' it's proper dhrunk'll be Batty the Fool this night, an' likewise the Hon. Cubberd Allen Wiggit-Galt, Etcetera. There's two of me now, an' it's twice the amount I must be dhrinkin'. I swear, I feel a thirst risin' that minds me o' Ingy in the hills, an' the mess o' the Rile Irish wance again."

"You'll be going away," said Franklin, sadly, as he rose and took Battersleigh by the hand. "You'll be going away and leaving me here alone—awfully alone."

"Ned," said the tall Irishman, rising and laying, a hand upon his shoulder, "don't ye belave I'll be lavin' ye. I've seen the worrld, an' I must see it again, but wance in a while I'll be comin' around here to see the best man's country on the globe, an' to meet agin the best man I ivver knew. I'll not till why I belave it, for that I can not do, but shure I do belave it, this is the land for you. There'll be workin' an' thinkin' here afther you an' Batty are gone, an' maybe they'll work out the joy an' sorrow of ut here. Don't be restless, but abide, an' take ye root here. For Batty, it's no odds. He's seen the worrld."

Battersleigh's words caused Franklin's face to grow still more grave, and his friend saw and suspected the real cause. "Tut, tut! me boy," he said, "I well know how your wishes lie. It's a noble gyurl ye've chosen, as a noble man should do. She may change her thought to-morrow. It's change is the wan thing shure about a woman."

Franklin shook his head mutely, but Battersleigh showed only impatience with him. "Go on with your plans, man," said he, "an' pay no attintion to the gyurl! Make ready the house and prepare the bridal gyarments. Talk with her raysonable, an' thin thry unraysonable, and if she won't love ye peaceful, thin thry force; an' she'll folly ye thin, to the ind of the earth, an' love ye like a lamb. It's Batty has studied the sex. Now, wance there was a gyurl—but no; I'll not yet thrust mesilf to spake o' that. God rist her asy ivermore!"

"Yes," said Franklin sadly, "that is it. That is what my own answer has been. She tells me that there was once another, who no longer lives—that no one else—"

Battersleigh's face grew grave in turn. "There's no style of assault more difficult than that same," said he. "Yet she's young; she must have been very young. With all respect, it's the nature o' the race o' women to yield to the livin', breathin' man above the dead an' honoured."

"I had my hopes," said Franklin, "but they're gone. They've been doing well at the Halfway House, and I've been doing well here. I've made more money than I ever thought I should, and I presume I may make still more. I presume that's all there is—just to make money, and then more, if you can. Let it go that way. I'll not wear my heart on my sleeve—not for any woman in the world."

Franklin's jaws set in fashion still more stern than their usual cast, yet there had come, as Battersleigh did not fail to notice, an older droop to the corners of his mouth, and a loss of the old brilliance of the eye.

"Spoken like a man," said Battersleigh, "an' if ye'll stick to that ye're the more like to win. Nivver chance follyin' too close in a campaign ag'inst a woman. Parallel an' mine, but don't uncover your forces. If ye advance, do so by rushes, an' not feelin' o' the way. But tin to wan, if ye lie still under cover, she'll be sendin' out skirmishers to see where ye are an' what ye are doin'. Now, ye love the gyurl, I know, an' so do I, an' so does ivery man that ivver saw her, for she's the sort min can't help adorin'. But, mind me, kape away. Don't write to her. Don't make poetry about her—God forbid! Don't do the act o' serrynadin' in anny way whativver. Make no complaint—if ye do she'll hate ye, like as not; for when a gyurl has wronged a man she hates him for it. Merely kape still. Ye've met your first reverse, an' ye've had your outposts cut up a bit, an' ye think the ind o' the worrld has come. Now, mind me, ould Batty, who's seen the lands; only do ye attind to dhrill an' sinthry-go an' commissariat, till in time ye find your forces in thrim again. By thin luk out fer heads stickin' up over the hills on the side o' the inimy, who'll be wonderin' what's goin' on. 'Go 'way,' she says to you, an' you go. 'Come back,' she whispers to herself, an' you don't hear it. Yet all the time she's wonderin' pfwhy you don't!"

Franklin smiled in spite of himself. "Battersleigh's Tactics and Manual of Strategy," he murmured. "All right, old man. I thank you just the same. I presume I'll live, at the worst. And there's a bit in life besides what we want for ourselves, you know."

"There's naught in life but what we're ready to take for oursilves!" cried Battersleigh. "I'll talk no fable of other fishes in the say for ye. Take what ye want, if ye'll have it. An' hearken; there's more to Ned Franklin than bein' a land agent and a petty lawyer. It's not for ye yersilf to sit an' mope, neyther to spind your life diggin' in a musty desk. Ye're to grow, man; ye're to grow! Do ye not feel the day an' hour? Man, did ye nivver think o' Destiny?"

"I've never been able not to believe in it," said Franklin. "To some men all things come easily, while others get on only by the hardest knocks; and some go always close to success, but die just short of the parapet. I haven't myself classified, just yet."

"Ye have your dreams, boy?"

"Yes; I have my dreams."

"All colours are alike," said Battersleigh. "Now, whut is my young Injun savage doin', when he goes out alone, on top of some high hill, an' builds him a little fire, an' talks with his familiar spirits, which he calls here his 'drame'? Isn't he searchin' an' feelin' o' himsilf, same as the haythin in far-away Ingy? Git your nose up, Ned, or you'll be unwittin' classifyin' yersilf with the great slave class which we lift behind not long ago, but which is follyin' us hard and far. Git your nose up, fer it's Batty has been thinkin' ye've Destiny inside your skin. Listen to Batty the Fool, and search your sowl. I'll tell ye this: I've the feelin' that I'll be hearin' of ye, in all the marrches o' the worrld. Don't disappoint me, Ned, for the ould man has belaved in ye—more than ye've belaved in yersilf. As to the gyurl—bah!—go marry her some day, av ye've nothin' more importhant on yer hands.

"But, me dear boy, spakin' o' importhant things, I ralely must be goin' now. I've certain importhant preparations that are essintial before I get dhrunk this avenin'—"

"O Battersleigh, do be sensible," said Franklin, "and do give up this talk of getting drunk. Come over here this evening and talk with me. It's much better than getting drunk."

Battersleigh's hand was on the door knob. "The consate o' you!" he said. "Thrue, ye're a fine boy, Ned, an' I know of no conversayshun more entertainin' than yer own, but I tale that if I didn't get dhrunk like a gintleman this avenin', I'd be violatin' me juty to me own conscience, as well as settin' at naught the thraditions o' the Rile Irish. An' so, if ye'll just excuse me, I'll say good-bye till, say, to-morrow noon."



CHAPTER XXXII

THE CALLING

And now there still fared on the swift, sane empire of the West. The rapid changes, the strivings, the accomplishments, the pretensions and the failures of the new town blended in the product of human progress. Each man fell into his place in the community as though appointed thereto, and the eyes of all were set forward. There was no retrospection, there were no imaginings, no fears, no disbeliefs. The people were as ants, busy building their hill, underletting it with galleries, furnishing it with chambers, storing it with riches, providing it with defences; yet no individual ant looked beyond his own antennae, or dreamed that there might be significance in the tiny footprints which he left. There were no philosophers to tell these busy actors that they were puppets in a great game, ants in a giant hill. They lived, loved, and multiplied; which, after all, is Life.

To Franklin the days and months and years went by unpunctuated, his life settling gradually into the routine of an unhappy calm. He neglected too much the social side of life, and rather held to his old friends than busied himself with the search for new. Battersleigh was gone, swiftly and mysteriously gone, though with the promise to return and with the reiteration of his advice and his well wishes. Curly was gone—gone up the Trail into a far and mysterious country, though he, too, promised to remember Ellisville, and had given hostage for his promise. His friends of the Halfway House were gone, for though he heard of them and knew them to be prosperous, he felt himself, by reason of Mary Ellen's decision, in propriety practically withdrawn from their personal acquaintance. Of the kaleidoscope of the oncoming civilization his eye caught but little. There had again fallen upon his life a season of blight, or self-distrust, of dull dissatisfaction with the world and with living. As in earlier years he had felt unrest and known the lack of settled purpose, so now, after having seen all things apparently set in order before him for progressive accomplishment, he had fallen back once more into that state of disbelief, of that hopeless and desperate awakening properly reserved only for old age, when the individual realizes that what he does is of itself of no consequence, and that what he is or is not stops no single star an atom in its flight, no blade of grass an iota in its growing.

Paralysis of the energies too often follows upon such self-revelations; and indeed it seemed to Franklin that he had suffered some deep and deadly benumbing of his faculties. He could not welcome the new days. His memory was set rather on the old days, so recent and in some way so dear. He loved the forgotten thunder of the buffalo, but in his heart there rose no exultation at the rumble of the wheels. Still conscientious, he plodded, nor did he cease to aspire even in his own restricted avocations. Because of his level common sense, which is the main ingredient in the success-portion, he went easily into the first councils of the community. Joylessly painstaking and exact, he still prospered in what simple practice of the law there offered, acting as counsel for the railway, defending a rare criminal case, collecting accounts, carrying on title contests and "adverse" suits in the many cases before the Register of the Land Office, and performing all the simple humdrum of the busy country lawyer. He made more and more money, since at that time one of his position and opportunities could hardly avoid doing so. His place in the business world was assured. He had no occasion for concern.

For most men this would have been prosperity sufficient; yet never did Edward Franklin lie down with the long breath of the man content; and ever in his dreams there came the vague beckoning of a hand still half unseen. Once this disturbing summons to his life was merely disquieting and unformulated, but gradually now it assumed a shape more urgent and more definite. Haunting him with the sense of the unfulfilled, the face of Mary Ellen was ever in the shadow; of Mary Ellen, who had sent him away forever; of Mary Ellen, who was wasting her life on a prairie ranch, with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her soul. That this rare plant should thus fail and wither seemed to him a crime quite outside his own personal concern. This unreal Mary Ellen, this daily phantom, which hung faces on bare walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some message for him. Yet had he not had his final message from the actual Mary Ellen? And, after all, did anything really matter any more?

So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life. This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy. Yet this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.

Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to Franklin's mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him would not always serve to satisfy him. Losing no touch of the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man. The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature. He found no solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which was careless of humanity's joys or sorrowings. Longing for the satisfying, for the noble things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ignoble and not uncomforting. Horrified that he could not rest in the way that he had chosen, distracted at these intangible desires, he doubted at times his perfect sanity; for though it seemed there was within him the impulse to teach and to create, he could not say to himself what or how was to be the form, whether mental or material, of the thing created, the thing typified, the thing which he would teach.

Of such travail, of such mould, have come great architects, great engineers, great writers, musicians, painters, indeed great men of affairs, beings who stand by the head and shoulders above other men as leaders. The nature of such men is not always at the first assured, the imprimitive seal not always surely set on, so that of one thus tormented of his inner self it may be mere accident which shall determine whether it is to be great artist or great artisan that is to be born again.

To Franklin, dreaming as he woke or slept, there sometimes waved a hand, there sometimes sounded a Voice, as that which of old summoned the prophet in the watches of the night. Neither in his waking nor his sleeping hours could he call this spirit into materialization, however much he longed to wrestle with it finally. It remained only to haunt him vaguely, to join with the shade of Mary Ellen the Cruel to set misery on a life which he had thought happily assured.



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE GREAT COLD

The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was unthreatening but mocking. Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open prairie. Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo and cattle range. Some of these houses were board "shacks," while others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half beneath the ground. Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less small, was none the less a home. Most of them contained families. Men had brought hither their wives and children—little children, sometimes babes, tender, needful of warmth and care. For these stood guardian the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along breaks and coulees, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long, faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and cruelly wipe away.

Yet there was no snow. There had been none the winter before. The trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe. The railroad men had ranged west all the winter, throats exposed and coats left at the wagons. It was a mild country, a gentle, tender country. In this laughing sky who could see any cynicism? The wind was cold, and the wild fowl flew clamouring south from the sheeted pools, but the great hares did not change their colour, and the grouse stayed brown, and the prairie dogs barked joyously. No harm could come to any one. The women and children were safe. Besides, was there not coal at the town? Quite outside of this, might not one burn coarse grass if necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn? No tree showed in scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky to call it treacherous.

One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field. The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless. The wires along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning—a warning unfounded and without apparent cause. Yet the sighing in the short grass was gone. In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible. There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things. The sky was blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried on, silent, to the nearest company.

Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing. Every horse free on the range came into the coulees that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued.

The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be. Still louder rose the requiem of the wire. The sky smiled on. There was no token to strike with alarm these human beings, their faculties dulled by a thousand years of differentiation. "Peace and goodwill," said men; for now it was coming on to Christmastide. But the wire was seeking to betray the secret of the sky, which was resolved to carry war, to sweep these beings from the old range that once was tenantless!

To the north there appeared a long, black cloud, hanging low as the trail of some far-off locomotive, new upon the land. Even the old hunters might have called it but the loom of the line of the distant sand hills upon the stream. But all at once the cloud sprang up, unfurling tattered battle flags, and hurrying to meet the sun upon the zenith battle ground. Then the old hunters and trappers saw what was betokened. A man came running, laughing, showing his breath white on the air. The agent at the depot called sharply to the cub to shut the door. Then he arose and looked out, and hurried to his sender to wire east along the road for coal, train loads of coal, all the coal that could be hurried on! This man knew the freight of the country, in and out, and he had once trapped for a living along these same hills and plains. He knew what was the meaning of the cloud, and the tall pointed spires of smoke, and the hurrying naked sun.

The cloud swept up and onward, and all persons closed their doors, and said that Christmas would be cold. In a quarter of an hour they saw their chronology late by a day. In half an hour they noted a gray mist drive across the sky. There was a faint wavering and spreading and deflection at the top of the tallest spire of smoke. Somewhere, high above, there passed a swarm of vast humming bees.

Out in the country, miles away from town, a baby played in the clear air, resting its plump knees in the shallow layer of chips where once a pile of wood had been. It turned its face up toward the sky, and something soft and white and cool dropped down upon its cheek.

In mid-sky met the sun and the cloud, and the sun was vanquished, and all the world went gray. Then, with a shriek and a whirl of a raw and icy air which dropped, dropped down, colder and colder and still more cold, all the world went white. This snow came not down from the sky, but slantwise across the land, parallel with the earth, coming from the open side of the coldest nether hell hidden in the mysterious North. Over it sang the air spirits. Above, somewhere, there was perhaps a sky grieving at its perfidy. Across the world the Titans laughed and howled. All the elements were over-ridden by a voice which said, "I shall have back my own!" For presently the old Plains were back again, and over them rushed the wild winds in their favourite ancient game.

Once the winds pelted the slant snow through the interstices of the grasses upon the furry back of the cowering coyote. Now they found a new sport in driving the icy powder through the cracks of the loose board shanty, upon the stripped back of the mother huddling her sobbing children against the empty, impotent stove, perhaps wrapping her young in the worn and whitened robe of the buffalo taken years ago. For it was only the buffalo, though now departed, which held the frontier for America in this unprepared season, the Christmas of the Great Cold. The robes saved many of the children, and now and then a mother also.

The men who had no fuel did as their natures bid, some dying at the ice-bound stove, and others in the open on their way for fuel; for this great storm, known sometimes as the Double Norther, had this deadly aspect, that at the end of the first day it cleared, the sky offering treacherous flag of truce, afterward to slay those who came forth and were entrapped. In that vast, seething sea of slantwise icy nodules not the oldest plainsman could hold notion of the compass. Many men died far away from home, some with their horses, and others far apart from where the horses stood, the latter also in many cases frozen stiff. Mishap passed by but few of the remoter homes found unprepared with fuel, and Christmas day, deceitfully fair, dawned on many homes that were to be fatherless, motherless, or robbed of a first-born. Thus it was that from this, the hardiest and most self-reliant population ever known on earth, there rose the heartbroken cry for comfort and for help, the frontier for the first time begging aid to hold the skirmish line. Indeed, back from this skirmish line there came many broken groups, men who had no families, or families that had no longer any men. It was because of this new game the winds had found upon the plains, and because of the deceitful double storm.

Men came into Ellisville white with the ice driven into their buffalo coats and hair and beards, their mouths mumbling, their feet stumbling and heavy. They begged for coal, and the agent gave to each, while he could, what one might carry in a cloth, men standing over the supply with rifles to see that fairness was enforced. After obtaining such pitiful store, men started back home again, often besought or ordered not to leave the town, but eager to die so much the closer to their families.

After the storm had broken, little relief parties started out, provided with section maps and lists of names from the Land Office. These sometimes were but counting parties. The wolves had new feed that winter, and for years remembered it, coming closer about the settlements, sometimes following the children as they went to school. The babe that touched with laughter the cool, soft thing that fell upon its cheek lay finally white and silent beneath a coverlid of white, and upon the floor lay others also shrouded; and up to the flapping door led tracks which the rescuing parties saw.

Sam Poston, the driver of the regular mail stage to the south, knew more of the condition of the settlers in that part of the country than any other man in Ellisville, and he gave an estimate which was alarming. There was no regular supply of fuel, he stated, and it was certain that the storm had found scores of families utterly unprepared. Of what that signifies, those who have lived only in the routine of old communities can have no idea whatever. For the most of us, when we experience cold, the remedy is to turn a valve, to press a knob, to ask forthwith for fuel. But if fuel be twenty miles away, in a sea of shifting ice and bitter cold, if it be somewhere where no man may reach it alive—what then? First, we burn the fence, if we can find it. Then we burn all loose things. We burn the chairs, the table, the bed, the doors— Then we rebel; and then we dream.

Sam Poston came into the office where Franklin sat on Christmas eve, listening to the clinking rattle of the hard snow on the pane. Sam was white from head to foot. His face was anxious, his habitual uncertainty and diffidence were gone.

"Cap," said he, with no prelude, "the whole country below'll be froze out. This blizzard's awful."

"I know it," said Franklin. "We must get out with help soon as we can. How far down do you think the danger line begins?"

"Well, up to three or four miles out it's thicker settled, an' most o' the folks could git into town. As fur out as thirty mile to the south, they might git a little timber yet, over on the Smoky. The worst strip is fifteen to twenty-five mile below. Folks in there is sort o' betwixt an' between, an' if they're short o' fuel to-day they'll have to burn anything they can, that's all, fer a feller wouldn't last out in this storm very long if he got lost. It's the worst I ever see in the West."

Franklin felt a tightening at his heart. "About fifteen to twenty-five miles?" he said. Sam nodded. Both were silent.

"Look here, Cap," said the driver presently, "you've allus told me not to say nothin' 'bout the folks down to the Halfway House, an' I hain't said a thing. I 'low you got jarred down there some. I know how that is. All the same, I reckon maybe you sorter have a leanin' that way still. You may be worried some—"

"I am!" cried Franklin. "Tell me, how were they prepared—would they have enough to last them through?"

"None too much," said Sam. "The old man was tellin' me not long back that he'd have to come in 'fore long to lay him in his coal for the winter. O' course, they had the corrals, an' some boards, an' stuff like that layin' 'round. They had the steps to the dugout, an' some little wood about the win'mill, though they couldn't hardly git at the tank—"

Franklin groaned as he listened to this calm inventory of resources in a case so desperate. He sank into a chair, his face between his hands. Then he sprang up. "We must go!" he cried.

"I know it," said Sam simply.

"Get ready," exclaimed Franklin, reaching for his coat.

"What do you mean, Cap—now?"

"Yes, to-night—at once."

"You d——d fool!" said Sam.

"You coward!" cried Franklin. "What! Are you afraid to go out when people are freezing—when—"

Sam rose to his feet, his slow features working. "That ain't right, Cap," said he. "I know I'm scared to do some things, but I—I don't believe I'm no coward. I ain't afraid to go down there, but I won't go to-night, ner let you go, fer it's the same as death to start now. We couldn't maybe make it in the daytime, but I'm willin' to try it then. Don't you call no coward to me. It ain't right."

Franklin again cast himself into his chair, his hand and arm smiting on the table. "I beg your pardon, Sam," said he presently. "I know you're not a coward. We'll start together in the morning. But it's killing me to wait. Good God! they may be freezing now, while we're here, warm and safe!"

"That's so," said Sam sententiously. "We can't help it. We all got to go some day." His words drove Franklin again to his feet, and he walked up and down, his face gone pinched and old.

"I 'low we won't sleep much to-night, Cap," said Sam quietly. "Come on; let's go git some coffee, an' see if anybody here in town is needin' help. We'll pull out soon as we kin see in the mornin'."

They went out into the cold, staggering as the icy sheet drove full against them. Ellisville was blotted out. There was no street, but only a howling lane of white. Not half a dozen lights were visible. The tank at the railway, the big hotel, the station-house, were gone—wiped quite away. The Plains were back again!

"Don't git off the main street," gasped Sam as they turned their faces down wind to catch their breath. "Touch the houses all along. Lord! ain't it cold!"

Ellisville was safe, or all of it that they could stumblingly discover. The town did not sleep. People sat up, greeting joyously any who came to them, eating, drinking, shivering in a cold whose edge could not be turned. It was an age till morning—until that morning of deceit.

At dawn the wind lulled. The clouds swept by and the sun shone for an hour over a vast landscape buried under white. Sam was ready to start, having worked half the night making runners for a sled at which his wild team snorted in the terror of unacquaintedness. The sled box was piled full of robes and coal and food and liquor—all things that seemed needful and which could hurriedly be secured. The breath of the horses was white steam, and ice hung on the faces of the men before they had cleared the town and swung out into the reaches of the open prairies which lay cold and empty all about them. They counted the smokes—Peterson, Johnson, Clark, McGill, Townsend, one after another; and where they saw smoke they rejoiced, and where they saw none they stopped. Often it was but to nail fast the door.

With perfect horsemanship Sam drove his team rapidly on to the south, five miles, ten miles, fifteen, the horses now warming up, but still restless and nervous, even on the way so familiar to them from their frequent journeyings. The steam of their breath enveloped the travellers in a wide, white cloud. The rude runners crushed into and over the packed drifts, or along the sandy grime where the wind had swept the earth bare of snow. In less than an hour they would see the Halfway House. They would know whether or not there was smoke.

But in less than two hours on that morning of deceit the sun was lost again. The winds piped up, the cold continued, and again there came the blinding snow, wrapping all things in its dancing, dizzy mist.

In spite of the falling of the storm, Franklin and his companion pushed on, trusting to the instinct of the plains horses, which should lead them over a trail that they had travelled so often before. Soon the robes and coats were driven full of snow; the horses were anxious, restless, and excited. But always the runners creaked on, and always the two felt sure they were nearing the place they sought. Exposed so long in this bitter air, they were cut through with the chill, in spite of all the clothing they could wear, for the norther of the plains has quality of its own to make its victims helpless. The presence of the storm was awful, colossal, terrifying. Sometimes they were confused, seeing dark, looming bulks in the vague air, though a moment later they noted it to be but the packing of the drift in the atmosphere. Sometimes they were gloomy, not hoping for escape, though still the horses went gallantly on, driven for the most part down a wind which they never would have faced.

"The wind's just on my right cheek," said Sam, putting up a mitten. "But where's it gone?"

"You're frozen, man!" cried Franklin. "Pull up, and let me rub your face."

"No, no, we can't stop," said Sam, catching up some snow and rubbing his white cheek as he drove.

"Keep the wind on your right cheek—we're over the Sand Run now, I think, and on the long ridge, back of the White Woman. It can't be over two mile more.—Git along, boys. Whoa! What's the matter there?"

The horses had stopped, plunging at something which they could not pass. "Good God!" cried Franklin, "whose fence is that? Are we at Buford's?"

"No," said Sam, "this must be at old man Hancock's. He fenced across the old road, and we had to make a jog around his d——d broom-corn field. It's only a couple o' miles now to Buford's."

"Shall I tear down the fence?" asked Franklin.

"No, it's no use; it'd only let us in his field, an' maybe we couldn't hit the trail on the fur side. We got to follow the fence a way. May God everlastingly damn any man that'll fence up the free range!—Whoa, Jack! Whoa, Bill! Git out o' here! Git up!"

They tried to parallel the fence, but the horses edged away from the wind continually, so that it was difficult to keep eye upon the infrequent posts of the meagre, straggling fence that this man had put upon the "public lands."

"Hold on, Sam!" cried Franklin. "Let me out."

"That's right, Cap," said Sam. "Git out an' go on ahead a way, then holler to me, so'st I kin come up to you. When we git around the corner we'll be all right."

But when they got around the corner they were not all right. At such times the mind of man is thrown off its balance, so that it does strange and irregular things. Both these men had agreed a moment ago that the wind should be on the right; now they disagreed, one thinking that Hancock's house was to the left, the other to the right, their ideas as to the direction of the Buford ranch being equally at variance. The horses decided it, breaking once again down wind, and striking a low-headed, sullen trot, as though they would out-march the storm. And so the two argued, and so they rode, until at last there was a lurch and a crash, and they found themselves in rough going, the sled half overturned, with no fence, no house, no landmark of any sort visible, and the snow drifting thicker than before. They sprang out and righted the sled, but the horses doggedly pulled on, plunging down and down; and they followed, clinging to reins and sled as best they might.

Either accident or the instinct of the animals had in some way taken them into rough, broken country, where they would find some shelter from the bitter level blast. They were soon at the bottom of a flat and narrow valley, and above them the wind roared and drove ever on a white blanket that sought to cover them in and under.

"We've lost the trail, but we done the best we could," said Sam doggedly, going to the heads of the horses, which looked questioningly back at him, their heads drooping, their breath freezing upon their coats in spiculae of white.

"Wait!" cried Franklin. "I know this hole! I've been here before. The team's come here for shelter—"

"Oh, it's the White Woman breaks—why, sure!" cried Sam in return.

"Yes, that's where it is. We're less than half a mile from the house. Wait, now, and let me think. I've got to figure this out a while."

"It's off there," said Sam, pointing across the coulee; "but we can't get there."

"Yes, we can, old man; yes, we can!" insisted Franklin. "I'll tell you. Let me think. Good God! why can't I think? Yes—see here, you go down the bottom of this gully to the mouth of the coulee, and then we turn to the left—no, it's to the right—and you bear up along the side of the draw till you get to the ridge, and then the house is right in front of you. Listen, now! The wind's north-west, and the house is west of the head of the coulee; so the mouth is east of us, and that brings the wind on the left cheek at the mouth of the coulee, and it comes more and more on the right cheek as we turn up the ridge; and it's on the front half of the right cheek when we face the house, I'm sure that's right—wait, I'll mark it out here in the snow. God! how cold it is! It must be right. Come on; come! We must try it, anyway."

"We may hit the house, Cap," said Sam calmly, "but if we miss it we'll go God knows where! Anyhow, I'm with you, an' if we don't turn up, we can't help it, an' we done our best."

"Come," cried Franklin once more. "Let's get to the mouth of the coulee. I know this place perfectly."

And so, advancing and calling, and waiting while Sam fought the stubborn horses with lash and rein out of the shelter which they coveted. Franklin led out of the flat coulee, into the wider draw, and edged up and up to the right, agonizedly repeating to himself, over and over again, the instructions he had laid down, and which the dizzy whirl of the snow mingled ever confusedly in his mind. At last they had the full gale again in their faces as they reached the level of the prairies, and cast loose for what they thought was west, fearfully, tremblingly, the voyage a quarter of a mile, the danger infinitely great; for beyond lay only the cruel plains and the bitter storm—this double norther of a woeful Christmastide.

Once again Providence aided them, by agency of brute instinct. One of the horses threw up its head and neighed, and then both pressed forward eagerly. The low moan of penned cattle came down the wind. They crashed into a fence of lath. They passed its end—a broken, rattling end, that trailed and swept back and forth in the wind.

"It's the chicken corral," cried Sam, "an' it's down! They've been burnin'—"

"Go on! go on—hurry!" shouted Franklin, bending down his head so that the gale might not quite rob him of his breath, and Sam urged on the now willing horses.

They came to the sod barn, and here they left the team that had saved them, not pausing to take them from the harness. They crept to the low and white-banked wall in which showed two windows, glazed with frost. They could not see the chimney plainly, but it carried no smell of smoke. The stairway leading down to the door of the dugout was missing, the excavation which held it was drifted full of snow, and the snow bore no track of human foot. All was white and silent. It might have been a vault far in the frozen northern sea.

Franklin burst open the door, and they both went in, half pausing. There was that which might well give them pause. The icy breath of the outer air was also here. Heaps and tongues of snow lay across the floor. White ashes lay at the doors of both the stoves. The table was gone, the chairs were gone. The interior was nearly denuded, so that the abode lay like an abandoned house, drifted half full of dry, fine powdered snow. And even this snow upon the floors had no tracks upon its surface. There was no sign of life.

Awed, appalled, the two men stood, white and huge, in the middle of the abandoned room, listening for that which they scarce expected to hear. Yet from one of the side rooms they caught a moan, a call, a supplication. Then from a door came a tall and white-faced figure with staring eyes, which held out its arms to the taller of the snow-shrouded forms and said: "Uncle, is it you? Have you come back? We were so afraid!" From the room behind this figure came a voice sobbing, shouting, blessing the name of the Lord. So they knew that two were saved, and one was missing.

They pushed into the remaining room. "Auntie went away," said the tall and white-faced figure, shuddering and shivering. "She went away into her room. We could not find the fence any more. Uncle, is it you? Come!" So they came to the bedside and saw Mrs. Buford lying covered with all her own clothing and much of that of Mary Ellen and Aunt Lucy, but with no robe; for the buffalo robes had all gone with the wagon, as was right, though unavailing. Under this covering, heaped up, though insufficient, lay Mrs. Buford, her face white and still and marble-cold. They found her with the picture of her husband clasped upon her breast.

"She went away!" sobbed Mary Ellen, leaning her head upon Franklin's shoulder and still under the hallucination of the fright and strain and suffering. She seemed scarce to understand that which lay before them, but continued to wander, babbling, shivering, as her arms lay on Franklin's shoulder. "We could not keep her warm," she said. "It has been very, very cold!"



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE ARTFULNESS OF SAM

In the early days of Ellisville society was alike in costume and custom, and as unsuspicious as it would have been intolerant of any idea of rank or class. A "beef" was a beef, and worth eight dollars. A man was a man, worth as much as his neighbour, and no more. Each man mended his own saddle. Thus society remained until there ensued that natural division which has been earlier mentioned, by which there became established two groups or classes—the dwellers in the Cottage and the dwellers in the Stone Hotel. This was at first a matter of choice, and carried no idea of rank or class distinction,

For a brief time there might have been found support for that ideally inaccurate statement of our Constitution which holds that all men are born free and equal, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With all our might we belie this clause, though in the time of Ellisville it might have had some footing. That day has long since passed.

The men of the Cottage Hotel continued big, brown, bespurred and behatted, yet it might have been observed that the tenantry of the Stone Hotel became gradually less sunburned and more immaculate. Mustaches swept not so sunburned, blonde and wide, but became in the average darker and more trim. At the door of the dining-room there were hat racks, and in time they held "hard hats." The stamping of the social die had begun its work. Indeed, after a time there came to be in the great dining-room of the Stone Hotel little groups bounded by unseen but impassable lines. The bankers and the loan agents sat at the head of the hall, and to them drifted naturally the ministers, ever in search of pillars. Lawyers and doctors sat adjacent thereunto, and merchants not far away. There was yet no shrug at the artisan, yet the invisible hand gradually swept him apart. Across the great gulfs, on whose shores sat the dining-room tables, men and women looked and talked, but trod not as they came in to meat, each person knowing well his place. The day of the commercial traveller was not yet, and for these there was no special table, they being for the most part assigned to the Red Belt; there being a certain portion of the hall where the tablecloths were checkered red and white. It was not good to be in the Red Belt.

Sam, the owner of the livery barn, had one table in the corner, where he invariably sat. His mode of entering the dining-room varied not with the passing of the years. Appearing at the door, he cast a frightened look at the occupants who had preceded him, and in whose faces he could imagine nothing but critical censure of his own person. Becoming aware of his hat, he made a dive and hung it up. Then he trod timidly through the door, with a certain side-draught in his step, yet withal an acceleration of speed which presently brought him almost at a run to his corner of refuge, where he dropped, red and with a gulp. Often he mopped his brow with the unwonted napkin, but discovery in this act by the stern eye of Nora, the head waitress, caused him much agony and a sudden search for a handkerchief. When Nora stood at his chair, and repeated to him frostily the menu of the day, all the world went round to Sam, and he gained no idea of what was offered him. With much effort at nonchalance, he would again wipe his face, take up his fork for twiddling, and say always the same thing.

"Oh, I ain't very hungry; jes' bring me a little pie an' beef an' coffee." And Nora, scornfully ignoring all this, then departed and brought him many things, setting them in array about his plate, and enabling him to eat as really he wished. Whether Sam knew that Nora would do this is a question which must remain unanswered, but it is certain that he never changed the form of his own "order."

Sam was a citizen. He had grown up with the town. He was, so to speak, one of the charter members of Ellisville, and thereby entitled to consideration. Moreover, his business was one of the most lucrative in the community, and he was beyond the clutching shallows and upon the easy flood of prosperity. No man could say that Sam owed him a dollar, nor could any man charge against him any act of perfidy, except such as might now and then be connected with the letting of a "right gentle" horse. There was no reason why Sam might not look any man in the face, or any woman. But this latter Sam had never done. His admiration for Nora bade fair to remain a secret known of all but the one most interested. Daily Sam sat at the table and listened to Nora's icy tones. He caught his breath if the glitter of her glasses faced him, and went in a fever as he saw her sail across the floor. Daily he arose with the stern resolve that before the sun had set he would have told this woman of that which so oppressed him; yet each day, after he had dined, he stole furtively away to the hat rack and slouched across the street to his barn, gazing down at his feet with abasement on his soul. "I ain't afeard o' any hoss that ever stood up," said he to himself, "but I can't say a word to that Nory girl, no matter how I try!"

It was one of Sam's theories that some day he would go in late to dinner, when there was no one else left in the great hall. He would ask Nora to come to serve him. Then he would grasp her hand, there as she stood by him, and he would pour forth to her the story of his long unuttered love. And then—but beyond this Sam could not think. And never yet had he dared go into the dining hall and sit alone, though it was openly rumoured that such had been the ruse of Curly with the "littlest waiter girl," before Curly had gone north on the Wyoming trail.

Accident sometimes accomplishes that which design fails to compass. One day Sam was detained with a customer much later than his usual dinner hour. Indeed, Sam had not been to dinner at the hotel for many days, a fact which the district physician at the railway might have explained. "Of course," said Sam, "I done the drivin', an' maybe that was why I got froze some more than Cap Franklin did, when we went down south that day." Frozen he had been, so that two of his fingers were now gone at the second joint, a part of his right ear was trimmed of unnecessary tissue, and his right cheek remained red and seared with the blister of the cold endured on that drive over the desolated land. It was a crippled and still more timid Sam who, unwittingly very late, halted that day at the door of the dining-room and gazed within. At the door there came over him a wave of recollection. It seemed to him all at once that he was, by reason of his afflictions, set still further without the pale of any possible regard. He dodged to his table and sat down without a look at any of his neighbours. To him it seemed that Nora regarded him with yet more visible scornfulness. Could he have sunk beneath the board he would have done so. Naught but hunger made him bold, for he had lived long at his barn on sardines, cheese, and crackers.

One by one the guests at the tables rose and left the room, and one by one the waiter girls followed them. The dining hour was nearly over. The girls would go upstairs for a brief season of rest before changing their checked gingham mid-day uniform for the black gown and white apron which constituted the regalia for the evening meal, known, of course, as "supper." Sam, absorbed in his own misery and his own hunger, awoke with a start to find the great hall apparently quite deserted.

It is the curious faculty of some men (whereby scientists refer us to the ape) that they are able at will to work back and forth the scalp upon the skull. Yet other and perhaps fewer men retain the ability to work either or both ears, moving them back and forth voluntarily. It was Sam's solitary accomplishment that he could thus move his ears. Only by this was he set apart and superior to other beings. You shall find of very many men but few able to do this thing. Moreover, if you be curious in philosophy, it shall come to be fixed in your memory that woman is disposed to love not one who is like to many, but to choose rather one who is distinct, superior, or more fit than his fellow-men; it being ever the intent of Nature that the most excellent shall attract, and thus survive.

As Sam sat alone at the table, his spoon rattling loud upon his plate in evidence of his mental disturbance, he absent-mindedly began to work back and forth his ears, perhaps solicitous to learn if his accomplishment had been impaired by the mishap which had caused him other loss. As he did this, he was intensely startled to hear behind him a burst of laughter, albeit laughter quickly smothered. He turned to see Nora, his idol, his adored, standing back of him, where she had slipped in with professional quiet and stood with professional etiquette, waiting for his departure, so that she might hale forth the dishes he had used. At this apparition, at this awful thought—for never in the history of man had Nora, the head waitress, been known to smile—the heart of Sam stopped forthwith in his bosom.

"I-I-I-I b-b-beg your—I-I d-didn't know you was there," he stammered in abject perturbation.

Nora sniffed. "I should think you might of knowed it," said she.

"I d-d-don't b-b-blame you fer laughin', M-M-Miss M-M-M-Markley," said Sam miserably.

"What at?" demanded Nora fiercely.

"At m-m-my air. I know it's funny, cut off, that way. But I c-c-can't help it. It's gone."

"I didn't," exclaimed Nora hotly, her face flushing. "Your ears is all right. I was laughin' at seein' you move 'em. I beg your pardon. I didn't know anybody could, that way, you know. I'm—I'm sorry."

A great light broke over Sam. A vast dam crashed free. His soul rushed forth in one mad wave.

"M-M-Miss M-M-Markley—Miss—Nory!" he exclaimed, whirling about and facing her, "d-d-d-do y-y-you l-l-like to s-s-see me work my airs?"

"Yes, it's funny," admitted Nora, on the point of another outbreak in spite of herself.

This amiability was an undreamed thing, yet Sam saw his advantage. He squared himself about, and, looking solemnly and earnestly in Nora's face, he pulled first his right and then his left ear forward until the members stood nearly at right angles to his head.

After all, the ludicrous is but the unexpected. Many laugh who see an old woman fall upon the slippery pavement. This new spectacle was the absolutely undreamed-of to Nora, who was no scientist. Her laughter was irrepressible. In a trice the precedents of years were gone. Nora felt the empire of her dignity slipping away, but none the less could not repress her mirth. And more than this; as she gazed into the honest, blue-eyed face before her she felt a lessening of her desire to retain her icy pedestal, and she struggled the less against her laughter. Indeed, with a sudden fright, she found her laughter growing nervous. She, the head waitress, was perturbed, alarmed!

Sam followed up his advantage royally. "I can work 'em both to onct!" he exclaimed triumphantly. And did so. "There! They was a boy in our school onct that could work his airs one at a time, but I never did see no one else but me that could work 'em both to onct. Look a-here!" He waggled his ears ecstatically. The reserve of Nora oozed, waned, vanished.

Even, the sternest fibre must at length succumb under prolonged Herculean endeavour. No man may long continuously wag his ears, even alternately; therefore Sam perforce paused in time. Yet by that time—in what manner it occurred no one may know—Nora was seated on the chair next to him at the table. They were alone. Silence fell. Nora's hand moved nervously among the spoons. Upon it dropped the mutilated one of Sam.

"Nory," said he, "I'd—I'd work 'em all my life—fer you!" And to Nora, who turned away her head now, not for the purpose of hiding a smile, this seemed always a perfectly fit and proper declaration of this man's regard.

"I know I'm no good," murmured Sam. "I'm a awful coward. I-I-I've l-l-loved you ever sence the fust time that I seen you, but I was such a coward, I—I couldn't—couldn't—"

"You're not!" cried Nora imperiously.

"Oh, yes, I am," said Sam.

"Look at them," said Nora, almost touching his crippled fingers. "Don't I know?"

"Oh, that," said Sam, hiding the hand under the droop of the tablecloth. "Why, that? I got froze some, a-drivin'."

"Yes, and," said Nora accusingly, "how did you get froze? A-drivin' 'way down there, in the storm, after folks. No one else'd go."

"Why, yes. Cap Franklin, he went," said Sam. "That wasn't nothin'. Why, o' course we'd go."

"No one else wouldn't, though."

Sam wondered. "I was always too much a coward to say a word to you," he began. And then an awful doubt sat on his soul.

"Nory," he resumed solemnly, "did ever any feller say anything to you about my—I-I-I—well, my lovin' you?"

"I should say not!" said Nora. "I'd a' slapped his face, mighty quick! What business—"

"Not never a single one?" said Sam, his face brightening.

"No, 'ndeed. Why, I'd like to know? Did you ever ask any one to!"

"I should say not!" said Sam, with the only lie he ever told, and one most admirable. "I should say not!" he repeated with emphasis, and in tones which carried conviction even to himself.

"You'd better not!" said Nora. "I wouldn't of had you if they had!"

Sam started. "What's that, Nory?" he said. "Say that ag'in! Did you say you wouldn't of had me—you wouldn't of?" His hand found hers again.

"Yes," faltered Nora, seeing herself entrapped by her own speech.

"Then, Nory," said Sam firmly, casting a big arm about her waist, "if you wouldn't of had me then, I reckon now you do." And neither from this subtlety nor from the sturdy arm did Nora seek evasion, though she tugged faintly at the fingers which held fast her waist.

"I don't care," she murmured vaguely. "There ain't no coward would of done it!" Whereat Sam, seeing himself a hero, wisely accepted fate and ceased to argue. The big arm tightened manfully, and into his blue eyes came the look of triumph.

"Nory," whispered he loyally, "I'll never work my airs ag'in for any woman in the world but you!"



CHAPTER XXXV

THE HILL OF DREAMS

Franklin found himself swept along with a tide of affairs other than of his own choosing. His grasp on the possibilities of the earliest days of this new civilization had been so full and shrewd that he needed now but to let others build the house whose foundation he had laid. This in effect has been the history of most men who have become wealthy, the sum of one man's efforts being in no great disparity actually superior to those of his fellow-man.

Yet Franklin cared little for mere riches, his ambition ceasing at that point where he might have independence, where he might be himself, and where he might work out unfettered the problems of his own individuality. Pursued by a prosperity which would not be denied, his properties growing up about him, his lands trebling in value within a year and his town property rising steadily in value, he sometimes smiled in very grimness as he thought of what this had once and so recently been, and how far beyond his own care the progress of his fortunes had run. At times he reflected upon this almost with regret, realizing strongly the temptation to plunge irrevocably into the battle of material things. This, he knew, meant a loosing, a letting go, a surrender of his inner and honourable dreams, an evasion of that beckoning hand and a forgetting of that summoning voice which bade him to labour agonizingly yet awhile toward other aims. The inner man, still exigent, now exhorted, now demanded, and always rebelled. Franklin's face grew older. Not all who looked upon him understood, for to be hors concours is to be accursed.

Something was left to be desired in the vigour and energy of Franklin's daily life, once a daily joy in virile effort and exertion. Still too much a man to pity himself, none the less he brooded. His hopes and dreams, he reflected, had once flowered so beautifully, had shown so fair for one brief summer day, and lay now so dead and shrivelled and undone! There was no comfort in these later days.

And then he thought yearningly of the forceful drama of the wild life which had shrunk so rapidly into the humdrum of the uneventful. At times he felt a wild yearning to follow this frontier—to follow till the West sunk into the sea, and even then to follow, until he came to some Fortunate Islands where such glorious days should die no more. He recalled the wild animals and the wild men he had known, and saw again the mocking face of the old wide plains, shifting and evading, even as the spirit of his own life evaded him, answering no questions directly, always beckoning, yet always with finger upon lip, forbidding speech. Almost with exultation he joined in the savage resentment of this land laid under tribute, he joined in the pitiless scorn of the savage winter, he almost justified in his own soul the frosted pane and the hearth made cold, and the settlers' homes forever desolated.

Yet ever a chill struck Franklin's soul as he thought of the lost battle at the Halfway House. There was now grass grown upon the dusty trail that once led up to the low-eaved house. The green and gray of Nature were shrouding busily the two lonely graves of those who had fought the, frontier and been vanquished in that night of terror, when the old West claimed its own. The Halfway House of old was but a memory. It had served its purpose, had fulfilled its mission, and those who once ruled it now were gone. The wild herds and the wild men came there no longer, and there were neither hosts nor those needing hospitality. And Mary Ellen, the stately visitant of his sleeping or his waking dreams, no longer might be seen in person at the Halfway House. Recreant, defeated, but still refusing aid, she had gone back to her land of flowers. It was Franklin's one comfort that she had never known into whose hands had passed—at a price far beyond their actual worth—the lands of the Halfway House, which had so rapidly built up for her a competency, which had cleared her of poverty, only to re-enforce her in her pride.

Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the crucial moment of his life. His nature was not more imaginative than comprehensive.

To a very few men Edward Franklin has admitted that he once dreamed of a hill topped by a little fire, whose smoke dipped and waved and caught him in its fold. In brief, he got into saddle, and journeyed to the Hill of Dreams.

The Hill of Dreams dominated the wide and level landscape over which it had looked out through hundreds of slow, unnoted years. From it once rose the signal smokes of the red men, and here it was that many a sentinel had stood in times long before a white face was ever seen upon the Plains. Here often was erected the praying lodge of the young aspirant for wisdom, who stood there and lifted up his hands, saying: "O sun! O air! O earth! O spirits, hear me pray! Give me aid, give me wisdom, so that I may know!"

Here on the Hill of Dreams, whence the eye might sweep to the fringed sand hills on the south, east to the river many miles away, and north and west almost to the swell of the cold steppes that lead up to the Rocky Range, the red men had sometimes come to lay their leaders when their day of hunting and of war was over. Thus the place came to have extraordinary and mysterious qualities ascribed to it, on which account, in times gone by, men who were restless, troubled, disturbed, dissatisfied, came thither to fast and pray. Here they builded their little fires, and here, night and day, they besought the sky, the sun, the firmament to send to them each his "dream," his unseen counsellor, which should speak to him out of its more than earthly wisdom.

When the young man was troubled and knew not which course he should pursue, he went up to this hill alone, and so laid hold upon Fate that it fain communed with him. He held up his hands at night to the stars, very far above him, and asked that they should witness him and be merciful, for that he was small and weak, and knew not why things should be as they were. He called upon the spirits of the great dead about him to witness the sincerity of his prayer. He placed offerings to the Dream People. He prayed to the sun as it rose, and besought it of its strength to strengthen him.

Sometimes when a young man had gone up alone from the village to this hill to pray, there were seen at night more forms than one walking upon the summit of the hill, and sometimes voices were heard. Then it was known that the young man had seen his "dream," and that they had held a council.

Very many men had thus prayed upon the summit of the Hill of Dreams in the days gone by. Its top was strewn with offerings. It was a sacred place. Sometimes the stone cairns did not withstand the wolves, but none the less the place was consecrate. Hither they bore the great dead. It was upon the Hill of Dreams that his people buried White Calf, the last great leader of the Plains tribes, who fell in the combat with the not less savage giant who came with the white men to hunt in the country near the Hill of Dreams. Since that time the power of the Plains tribes had waned, and they had scattered and passed away. The swarming white men—Visigoths, Vandals—had found out this spot for centuries held mysteriously dear to the first peoples of that country. They tore open the graves, scattered the childlike emblems, picked to pieces the little packages of furs and claws, jibing at the "medicine" which in its time had meant so much to the man who had left it there.

The Visigoths and Vandals laughed and smote upon their thighs as they thus destroyed the feeble records of a faith gone by. Yet with what more enduring and with how dissimilar a faith did they replace that at which they mocked? White but parallels red. Our ways depart not widely from the ways of those whom we supplanted, our religion is little more than theirs, our tokens of faith but little different from theirs. We still wonder, we still beseech, we still grope, and continually we implore. On the eminences of our lives the solitary still keep vigil. In the air about us there still are Voices as of old, there still are visions wistfully besought. Now, as then, dwarfed, blighted, wandering humanity prays, lifting up its hands to something above its narrow, circumscribing world. Now, as then, the answer is sometimes given to a few for all. Now, as then, the solemn front of the Hill of Dreams still rises, dominating calmly the wide land, keeping watch always out over the plains for those who are to come, for that which is to be. Warden of destiny, it well might smile at any temples we may build, at any fetiches that we may offer up!

Toward the Hill of Dreams Franklin journeyed, because it had been written. As he travelled over the long miles he scarcely noted the fields, the fences, the flocks and herds now clinging along the path of the iron rails. He crossed the trails of the departed buffalo and of the vanishing cattle, but his mind looked only forward, and he saw these records of the past but dimly. There, on the Hill of Dreams, he knew, there was answer for him if he sufficiently besought; that answer not yet learned in all the varying days. It seemed sure to him that he should have a sign.[*]

Franklin looked out over a deserted and solitary land as he rode up to the foot of the hill. There were no longer banners of dust where the wild game swept by, nor did the eye catch any line of distant horsemen. It was another day. Yet, as did the candidate of old, he left his horse at the foot of the hill and went up quite alone.

It was afternoon as he sat down. The silence and solitude folded him about, and the sun sank so fitly slow that he hardly knew, and the solemn night swept softly on. . . . Then he built a little fire. . . . In the night, after many hours, he arose and lifted up his hands. . . . At the foot of the hill the pony stopped cropping grass, tossed his head, and looked up intently at the summit.

It was morning. The sun rose calm and strong. The solitary figure upon the hill sat motionless, looking out. There might have passed before him a perspective of the past, the Plains peopled with their former life; the oncoming of the white men from below; the remnant of the passing Latin race, typified in the unguided giant who, savage with savage, fought here near by, one brutal force meeting another and both passing before one higher and yet more strong. To this watcher it seemed that he looked out from the halfway point of the nation, from the halfway house of a nation's irresistible development.

Franklin had taken with him a small canteen of water, but bethinking himself that as of old the young man beseeching his dream neither ate nor drank until he had his desire, he poured out the water at his side as he sat in the dark. The place was covered with small objects, bits of strewn shells and beads and torn "medicine bundles"—pieces of things once held dear in earlier minds. He felt his hand fall by accident upon some small object which had been wetted by the wasted water. Later, in the crude light of the tiny flame which he had kindled, this lump of earth assumed, to his exalted fancy, the grim features of an Indian chieftain, wide-jawed, be-tufted, with low brow, great mouth, and lock of life's price hanging down the neck. All the fearlessness, the mournfulness, the mysticism of the Indian face was there. Franklin always said that he had worked at this unconsciously, kneading the lump between his fingers, and giving it no thought other than that it felt cooling to his hand and restful to his mind. Yet here, born ultimately of the travail of a higher mind, was a man from another time, in whose gaze sat the prescience of a coming day. The past and the future thus were bridged, as may be done only by Art, the enduring, the uncalendared, the imperishable.

Shall we say that this could not have been? Shall we say that Art may not be born in a land so young? Shall we say that Art may not deal with things uncatalogued, and dare not treat of unaccepted things? Nay, rather let us say that Art, being thought, has this divine right of elective birth. For out of tortures Art had here won the deep imprimatur.

Edward Franklin, a light-hearted man, rode homeward happily. The past lay correlated, and for the future there were no longer any wonderings. His dream, devoutly sought, had given peace.

[*]Before his twenty-ninth year Edward Franklin's hair had always been a dark reddish brown. When he returned from a certain journey it was noticed that upon his temple there was a lock of snowy whiteness. Shon-to, a Cheyenne Indian, once noticed this and said to Franklin: "You have slept upon the Dreaming Hill, and a finger has touched you! Among my people there was a man who had a spot of white in his hair, and his father had this spot, and his son after him. These men were thought to have been touched by the finger of a dream many years ago. These men could see in the dark." The Indian said this confidently.



CHAPTER XXXVI

AT THE GATEWAY

In a certain old Southern city there stands, as there has stood for many generations, and will no doubt endure for many more, a lofty mansion whose architecture dates back to a distant day. Wide and spacious, with lofty stories, with deep wings and many narrow windows, it rests far back among the ancient oaks, a stately memorial of a day when gentlemen demanded privacy and could afford it. From the iron pillars of the great gateway the white front of the house may barely be seen through avenues made by the trunks of the primeval grove. The tall white columns, reaching from gallery floor to roof without pause for the second lofty floor, give dignity to this old-time abode, which comports well with the untrimmed patriarchal oaks. Under these trees there lies, even today, a deep blue-grass turf which never, from the time of Boone till now, has known the touch of ploughshare or the tool of any cultivation.

It was the boast of this old family that it could afford to own a portion of the earth and own it as it came from the hand of Nature. Uncaught by the whirl of things, undisturbed essentially even by the tide of the civil war, this branch of an old Southern family had lived on in station unaffected, though with fortune perhaps impaired as had been those of many Southern families, including all the Beauchamp line.

To this strong haven of refuge had come Mary Ellen Beauchamp from the far-off Western plains, after the death of her other relatives in that venture so ill-starred. The white-haired old widow who now represented the head of the Clayton family—her kin somewhat removed, but none the less her "cousins," after the comprehensive Southern fashion—had taken Mary Ellen to her bosom, upbraiding her for ever dreaming of going into the barbarian West, and listening but little to the plea of the girl that poverty had driven her to the company of those who, like herself, were poor. Now, such had been the turn of the wheel, the girl was nearly as rich in money as her older relative, and able to assume what little of social position there remained in her ambition.

Mary Ellen was now well past twenty-seven, a tall, matured, and somewhat sad-faced woman, upon her brow written something of the sorrows and uncertainties of the homeless woman, as well as the record of a growing self-reliance. If Mary Ellen were happy or not none might say, yet surely she was dutiful and kind; and gradually, with something of the leadership she had learned in her recent life, she slipped into practical domestic command of this quiet but punctilious menage. By reason of an equal executive fitness Aunt Lucy rose in the kitchen also into full command. The Widow Clayton found her cousin Mary Ellen a stay and comfort, useful and practical to a degree unknown in the education of the Southern young lady of the time.

Of her life in the West Mary Ellen spoke but little, though never with harshness, and at times almost with wistfulness. Her history had seemed too full of change to be reality. For the future she made no plans. It seemed to her to be her fate ever to be an alien, a looker-on. The roses drooped across her lattice, and the blue grass stood cool and soft and deep beyond her window, and the kind air carried the croon of the wooing mocking bird; yet there persisted in her brain the picture of a wide, gray land, with the sound of an urgent wind singing in the short, tufted grasses, and the breath of a summons ever on the air. Out there upon the Plains it had been ever morning. Here life seemed ever sinking toward its evening-tide.

This old family and the family house were accepted unquestioningly by the quiet Southern community now, as they had ever been, as a part of the aristocracy of the land, and as appurtenances there-to. The way of life had little change. The same grooms led out the horses from the stables, the same slow figures cut the grass upon the lawn. Yet no longer were the doors thrown open upon a sea of light and colour. The horses were groomed and broken, but they brought no great carriage of state sweeping up the drive between the lion-headed pillars of the gateway. When Mrs. Clayton feebly sought to propose brighter ways of life for the young woman, the latter told her gently that for her, too, life was planned and done, the struggle over, and that she asked only that she might rest, and not take up again any questions for readjustment.

"You will change after a while, honey," said her protectress; but Mary Ellen only smiled. It was enough to rest here in this haven, safe from the surging seas of doubt and hope and fear, of love and self-distrust. Let it be settled. Let it be ended. Let these tall white columns mark the grave of her heart. Let this wide sea of green mirror that which should one day lie above her bosom in this land of finished things. Let the great lion gates guard off all intrusion, all curiosity, even all well-intended courtesy. For her no cavalier should ever come riding up the gravelled way, nor should lights ever set dancing again the shadows in the great dining hall over the heads of guests assembled in her honour. It was done—finished. And Mary Ellen was not yet twenty-eight.

One morning the little street car stood, as was its wont, at the terminus of the track, near the front of the wide grounds of the old mansion house. This was far out upon the edge of the little city, and few were the patrons that might be expected; but it was held but mere courtesy to offer the services of the street-car line to this family, so long recognised as one of the unimpeachably best of this Southern city. This modern innovation of the street car was not readily taken up by the conservative community, and though it had been established for some years, it might be questioned whether its shares had ever paid much interest upon their face value. Now and then a negress with a laundry bundle, a schoolgirl with her books, a clerk hurrying to his counter, might stop the lazy mules and confer the benefit of an infrequent coin.

At this terminus of the line at the outskirts of the town there was each morning enacted the same little scene. The driver slowly unhitched his mules and turned them about to the other end of the car, in readiness for the return journey. Matters having progressed this far, the mules fell at once into a deep state of dejection and somnolence, their ears lopping down, their bodies drooping and motionless, save as now and then a faint swish of tail or wag of a weary ear bespoke the knowledge of some bold, marauding fly. The driver, perched upon his seat, his feet upon the rail, his knees pushed toward his chin, sat with his broad hat drawn down upon his forehead, his hands clasped between his legs, and all his attitude indicative of rest. Slow clouds of dust passed along the road near by, and the glare of the sun grew warm; but no motion came to either team or driver, undisturbed by any care and bound by no inconvenient schedule. From the big oaks came now and then the jangle of a jay, or there might be seen flitting the scarlet flame of the cardinal. These things were unnoted, and the hour droned on.