"And do you mean to say that because Amos Judson turned you off and cut you out of his will, you had to come out to this forsaken land? I thought better of the town," I declared.

"Oh, don't you mind! Cris Mead offered me a place in the bank. Dr. Hemingway was fur havin' me fill his pulpit off an' on. He's gettin' old. An' Judge Baronet was all but ready to adopt me in the place av a son he'd lost. But I knowed the boy'd soon be back."

O'mie gave me a sidelong glance, but I gave no hint of any feeling.

"No, I was like Bud, ready to try the frontier," he added more seriously. "I'm goin' down with you to join this Kansas regiment."

"Now what the deuce can you do in the army, O'mie?" I could not think of him anywhere but in Springvale.

"I want to live out av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered. "And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come to Springvale last month?"

"Give it up," I answered.

"Father Le Claire."

"Oh, the good man!" Bud exclaimed.

"Where has he been? and where was he going?" I asked coldly.

O'mie looked at me curiously. He was shrewder than Bud, and he caught the tone I had meant to conceal.

"Where? Just now he's gone to St. Louis. He's in a hospital there. He's been sick. I never saw him so white and thin as whin he left. He told me he expected to be with the Osages this Winter."

"I'm glad of that," I remarked.

"Why?" O'mie spoke quickly.

"Oh, I was afraid he might go out West. It's hard on priests in the West."

O'mie looked steadily at me, but said nothing.

"Who taketh your plathe, O'mie?" Bud asked.

"That's the beauty av it. It's a lady," O'mie answered.

Somehow my heart grew sick. Could it be Marjie, I wondered. I knew money matters were a problem with the Whatelys, but I had hoped for better fortune through my father's help. Maybe, though, they would have none of him now any more than of myself. When Marjie and I were engaged I did not care for her future, for it was to be with me, and my burden was my joy then. Not that earning a living meant any disgrace to the girl. We all learned better than that early in the West.

"Well, who be thaid lady?" Bud questioned.

"Miss Letitia Conlow," O'mie answered with a grave face.

"Oh, well, don't grieve, O'mie; it might be worse. Cheer up!" I said gayly.

"It couldn't be, by George! It just couldn't be no worse." O'mie was more than grave, he was sad now. "Not for me, bedad! I'm glad." He breathed deeply of the sweet, pure air of the Plains. "I can live out here foine, but there's goin' to be the divil to pay in the town av Springvale in the nixt six months. I'm glad to be away."

The next day I left the fort for Topeka. My determination to stay in the struggle was not merely a young man's love of adventure, nor was my declaration of what would be done to the Indian tribes an idle boast. The tragic days of Kansas were not all in its time of territorial strife and border ruffianism. The story of the Western Plains—the short grass country we call it now—in the decade following the Civil War is a tragedy of unparalleled suffering and danger and heroism. In the cold calculation of the official reports the half-year I had entered on has its tabulated record of one hundred and fifty-eight men murdered, sixteen wounded, forty-one scalped, fourteen women tortured, four women and twenty-four children carried into captivity. And nearly all this record was made in the Saline and Solomon and Republican River valleys in Kansas.

The Summer of the preceding year a battalion of soldiers called the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry spent four months on the Plains. Here they met and fought two deadly foes, the Indians and the Asiatic cholera. Theirs was a record of bravery and endurance; and their commander, Major Horace L. Moore, keeps always a place in my own private hall of fame.

Winter had made good Indians out of the savage wretches, as usual; but the Summer of 1868 brought that official count of tragedy with all the unwritten horror that history cannot burden itself to carry. Only one thing seemed feasible now, to bear the war straight into the heart of the Indian country in a winter campaign, to deal an effectual blow to the scourge of the Plains, this awful menace to the frontier homes. General Sheridan had asked Kansas to furnish a cavalry regiment for United States military service for six months.

The capital city was a wide-awake place that October. The call for twelve hundred men was being answered by the veterans of the Plains and by the young men of Kansas. The latter took up the work as many a volunteer in the Civil War began it—in a sort of heyday of excitement and achievement. They gave little serious thought to the cost, or the history their record was to make. But in the test that followed they stood, as the soldiers of the nation had stood before them, courageous, unflinching to the last. Little notion had those rollicking young fellows of what lay before them—a winter campaign in a strange country infested by a fierce and cunning foe who observed no etiquette of civilized warfare.

At the Teft House, where Bud and O'mie and I stopped, I met Richard Tillhurst. We greeted each other cordially enough.

"So you're here to enlist, too," he said. "I thought maybe you were on your way home. I am going to enlist myself and give up teaching altogether if I can pass muster." He was hardly of the physical build for a soldier. "Have you heard the news?" he went on. "Judson and Marjory are engaged. Marjie doesn't speak of it, of course, but Judson told Dr. Hemingway and asked him to officiate when the time comes. Mrs. Whately says it's between the young people, and that means she has given her consent. Judson spends half his time at Whately's, whether Marjie's there or not. There's something in the air down there this Fall that's got everybody keyed up one way or another. Tell Mapleson's been like a boy at a circus, he's so pleased over something; and Conlow has a grin on his face all the time. Everybody seems just unsettled and anxious, except Judge Baronet. Honestly, I don't see how that town could keep balanced without him. He sails along serene and self-possessed. Always knows more than he tells."

"I guess Springvale is safe with him, and we can go out and save the frontier," I said carelessly.

"For goodness' sake, who goes there?" Tillhurst pushed me aside and made a rush out of doors, as a lady passed before the windows. I followed and caught a glimpse of the black hair and handsome form of Rachel Melrose. At the same moment she saw me. Her greeting lacked a little of its former warmth, but her utter disregard of anything unpleasant having been between us was positively admirable. Her most coquettish smiles, however, were for Tillhurst, but that didn't trouble me. Our interview was cut short by the arrival of the stage from the south just then, and I turned from Tillhurst to find myself in my father's embrace. What followed makes one of the sacred memories a man does not often put into print.

We wanted to be alone, so we left the noisy hotel and strolled out toward the higher level beyond the town. There was only brown prairie then stretching to the westward and dipping down with curve and ravine to the Kaw River on the one side and the crooked little Shunganunga Creek on the other. Away in the southwest the graceful curve of Burnett's Mound, a low height like a tiny mountain-peak, stood out purple and hazy in the October sunlight. A handful of sturdy young people were taking their way to Lincoln College, the little stone structure that was to be dignified a month later by a new title, Washburn College, in honor of its great benefactor, Ichabod Washburn.

"Why did the powers put the State Capitol and the College so far from town, I wonder," I said as we loitered about the walls of the former.

"For the same reason that the shortsighted colonists of the Revolution put Washington away off up the Potomac, west of the thirteen States," my father answered. "We can't picture a city here now, but it will be built in your day if not in mine."

And then we walked on until before us stood that graceful little locust tree, the landmark of the prairie. Its leaves were falling in golden showers now, save as here and there a more protected branch still held its summer green foliage.

"What a beautiful, sturdy little pioneer!" my father exclaimed. "It has earned a first settler's right to the soil. I hope it will be given the chance to live, the chance most of the settlers have had to fight for, as it has had to stand up against the winds and hold its own against the drouth. Any enterprising city official who would some day cut it down should be dealt with by the State."

We sat down by the tree and talked of many things, but my father carefully avoided the mention of Marjie's name. When he gave the little girl the letter that had fallen from her cloak pocket he read her story in her face, but he had no right or inclination to read it aloud to me. I tried by all adroit means to lead him to tell me of the Whatelys. It was all to no purpose. On any other topic I would have quitted the game, but—oh, well, I was just the same foolish-hearted boy that put the pink blossoms on a little girl's brown curls and kissed her out in the purple shadows of the West Draw one April evening long ago. And now I was about to begin a dangerous campaign where the hazard of war meant a nameless grave for a hundred, where it brought after years of peace and honor to one. I must hear something of Marjie. The love-light in her brown eyes as she gave me one affectionate glance when I presented her to Rachel Melrose in my father's office—that pledge of her heart, I pictured over and over in my memory.

"Father, Tillhurst says he has heard that Amos Judson and Marjie are engaged. Are they?" I put the question squarely. My father was stripping the gold leaves one by one off a locust spray.

"Yes, I have heard it, too," he replied, and to save my life I could not have judged by word or manner whether he cared one whit or not. He was studying me, if toying with a locust branch and whistling softly and gazing off at Burnett's Mound are marks of study. He had nothing of himself to reveal. "I have heard it several times," he went on. "Judson has made the announcement quietly, but generally."

He threw away the locust branch, shook down his cuff and settled it in his sleeve, lifted his hat from his forehead and reset it on his head, and then added as a final conclusion, "I don't believe it."

He had always managed me most skilfully when he wanted to find out anything; and when the time came that I began in turn to manage him, being of his own blood, the game was interesting. But before I knew it, we had drifted far away from the subject, and I had no opportunity to come back to it. My father had found out all he wanted to know.

"Phil, I must leave on the train for Kansas City this evening," he said as we rose to go back to town. "I'm to meet Morton there, and we may go on East together. He will have the best surgeons look after that wound of his, Governor Crawford tells me."

Then laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder he said, "I congratulate you on the result of your first campaign. I had hoped it would be your last; but you are a man, and must choose for yourself. Yet, if you mean to give yourself to your State now, if you choose a man's work, do it like a man, not like a schoolboy on a picnic excursion. The history of Kansas is made as much by the privates down in the ranks as by the men whose names and faces adorn its record. You are making that record now. Make it strong and clean. Let the glory side go, only do your part well. When you have finished this six months and are mustered out, I want you to come home at once. There are some business matters and family matters demanding it. But I must go to Kansas City, and from there to New York on important business. And since nobody has a lease on life, I may as well say now that if you get back and I'm not there, O'mie left his will with me before he went away."

"His will? Now what had he to leave? And who is his beneficiary?"

"That's all in the will," my father said, smiling, "but it is a matter that must not be overlooked. In the nature of things the boy will go before I do. He's marked, I take it; never has gotten over the hardships of his earliest years and that fever in '63. Le Claire came back to see him and me in September."

"He did? Where did he come from?"

My father looked at me quickly. "Why do you ask?" he queried.

"I'll tell you when we have more time. Just now I'm engaged to fight the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, in which last tribe my friend Jean Pahusca has pack right. He was in that gang of devils that fought us out on the Arickaree."

For once I thought I knew more than my father, but he replied quietly, "Yes, I knew he was there. His tether may be long, but its limit will be reached some day."

"Who told you he was there, father?" I asked.

"Le Claire said so," he answered.

"Where was he at that time?" I was getting excited now.

"He spent the week in the little stone cabin out by the big cottonwood. Took cold and had to go to St. Louis to a hospital for a week or two."

"He was in the haunted cabin the third week in September," I repeated slowly; "then I don't know black from white any more."

My father smiled at me. "They call that being 'locoed' out on the Plains, don't they?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. "You have a delusion mixed up in your gray matter somewhere. One thing more," he added as an unimportant afterthought, "I see Miss Melrose is still in Topeka."

"Yes," I answered.

"And Tillhurst, too," he went on. "Well, there has been quite a little story going around Conlow's shop and the post-office and Fingal's Creek and other social centres about you two; and now when Tillhurst gets back (he'll never make the cavalry), he's square, but a little vain and thin-skinned, and he may add something of color and interest to the story. Let it go. Just now it may be better so."

I thought his words were indefinite, for one whose purposes were always definite, and in the wisdom of my youth I wondered whether he really wanted me to follow Rachel's leading, or whether he was, after all, inclined to believe Judson's assertion about his engagement, and family pride had a little part to play with him. It was unlike John Baronet to stoop to a thing like that.

"Father," I said, "I'm going away, too. I may never come back, and for my own sake I want to assure you of one thing: no matter what Tillhurst may say, if Rachel Melrose were ten times more handsome, if she had in her own name a fortune such as I can never hope to acquire myself, she would mean nothing to me. I care nothing for the stories now"—a hopelessness would come into my voice—"but I do not care for her either. I never did, and I never could."

My eyes were away on Burnett's Mound, and the sweet remembrance of Marjie's last affectionate look made a blur before them. We stood in silence for some time.

"Phil," said John Baronet in a deep, fervent tone, "I have a matter I meant to take up later, but this is a good time. Let the young folks go now. This is a family matter. Years ago a friend of the older Baronets died in the East leaving some property that should sooner or later come to me to keep in trust for you. This time was to be at the death of the man and his wife who had the property for their lifetime. Philip, you have been accused by the Conlow-Judson crowd of wanting a rich wife. I also am called grasping by Tell Mapleson's class. And," he smiled a little, "indeed, Iago's advice to Roderigo, 'Put money in thy purse,' was sound philosophy if the putting be honestly done. But this little property in the East that should come to you is in the hands of a man who is now ill, probably in his last sickness. He has one child that will have nothing else left to her. Shall we take this money at her father's death?"

"Why, father, no. I don't want it. Do you want it?"

I knew him too well to ask the question. Had I not seen the unselfish, kindly, generous spirit that had marked all his business career? Springvale never called him grasping, save as his prosperity grated on men of Mapleson's type.

"Will you sign a relinquishment to your claim, and trust to me that it is the best for us to do?" he asked.

"Just as soon as we get to an inkstand," I answered. Nor did I ever hold that such a relinquishment is anything but Christian opportunity.

That evening I said good-bye to my father, and when I saw him again it was after I had gone through the greatest crisis of these sixty years. On the same train that bore my father to the East were his friend Morton and his political and professional antagonist, Tell Mapleson. The next day I enlisted in Troop A of the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry, and was quartered temporarily in the State House, north of Fifth Street, on Kansas Avenue. Tillhurst was not admitted to the regiment, as my father had predicted. Neither was Jim Conlow, who had come up to Topeka for that purpose. Good-natured, shallow-pated "Possum," no matter where he found work to do, he sooner or later drifted back to Springvale to his father's forge. He did not realize that no Conlow of the Missouri breed ought ever to try anything above a horse's hoofs, in cavalry matters. The Lord made some men to shoe horses, and some to ride them. The Conlows weren't riders, and Jim's line was turned again to his father's smithy.

Tillhurst took his failure the more grievously that Rachel, who had been most gracious to him at first, transferred her attentions to me. And I, being only a man and built of common clay, with my lifetime hope destroyed, gave him good reason to believe in my superior influence with the beautiful Massachusetts girl. I had a game to play with Rachel, for Topeka was full of pretty girls, and I made the most of my time. I knew somewhat of the gayety the Winter on the Plains was about to offer. As long as I could I held to the pleasures of the civilized homes and sheltered lives. And with all and all, one sweet girl-face, enshrined in my heart's holy of holies, held me back from idle deception and turned me from temptation.



CHAPTER XXII

THE NINETEENTH KANSAS CAVALRY

"The regiments of Kansas have glorified our State on a hundred battle fields, but none served her more faithfully, or endured more in her cause than the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry."

—HORACE L. MOORE.

When Camp Crawford was opened, northeast of town, between the Kaw River and the Shunganunga Creek, I went into training for regular cavalry service, thinking less of pretty girls and more of good horses with the passing days. I had plenty of material for both themes. Not only were there handsome young ladies in the capital city, but this call for military supplies had brought in superb cavalry mounts. Every day the camp increased its borders. The first to find places were the men of the Eighteenth Kansas Regiment, veterans of the exalted order of the wardens of civilization. Endurance was their mark of distinction, and Loyalty their watchword. It was the grief of this regiment, and especially of the men directly under his leadership, that Captain Henry Lindsey was not made a Major for the Nineteenth. No more capable or more popular officer than Lindsey ever followed an Indian trail across the Plains.

It was from the veterans of this Eighteenth Cavalry, men whom Lindsey had led, that we younger soldiers learned our best lessons in the months that followed. Those were my years of hero-worship. I had gone into this service with an ideal, and the influence of such men as Morton and Forsyth, the skill of Grover, and the daring of Donovan and Stillwell were an inspiration to me. And now my captain was the same Pliley, who with Donovan had made that hundred-mile dash to Fort Wallace to start a force to the rescue of our beleaguered few in that island citadel of sand.

The men who made up Pliley's troop were, for the most part, older than myself, and they are coming now to the venerable years; but deep in the heart of each surviving soldier of that company is admiration and affection for the fearless, adroit, resourceful Captain, the modest, generous-hearted soldier.

On the last evening of our stay in Topeka there was a gay gathering of young people, where, as usual, the soldier boys were the lions. Brass buttons bearing the American Eagle and the magic inscription "U. S." have ever their social sway.

Rachel had been assigned to my care by the powers that were. After Tillhurst's departure I had found my companions mainly elsewhere, and I would have chosen elsewhere on this night had I done the choosing. On the way to her aunt's home Rachel was more charming than I had ever found her before. It was still early, and we strolled leisurely on our way and talked of many things. At the gate she suddenly exclaimed:

"Philip, you leave to-morrow. Maybe I shall never see you again; but I'm not going to think that." Her voice was sweet, and her manner sincere. "May I ask you one favor?"

"Yes, a dozen," I said, rashly.

"Let's take one more walk out to our locust tree."

"Oh, blame the locust tree! What did it ever grow for?" That was my thought but I assented with a show of pleasure, as conventionality demands. It was a balmy night in early November, not uncommon in this glorious climate. The moon was one quarter large, and the dim light was pleasant. Many young people were abroad that evening. When we reached the swell where the tree threw its lacy shadows on its fallen yellow leaves, my companion grew silent.

"Cheer up, Rachel," I said. "We'll soon be gone and you'll be free from the soldier nuisance. And Dick Tillhurst is sure to run up here again soon. Besides, you have all Massachusetts waiting to be conquered."

She put her little gloved hand on my arm.

"Philip Baronet, I'm going to ask you something. You may hate me if you want to."

"But I don't want to," I assured her.

"I had a letter from Mr. Tillhurst to-day. He does want to come up," she went on; "he says also that the girl you introduced to me in your father's office, what's her name?—I've forgotten it."

"So have I. Go on!"

"He says she is to be married at Christmas to somebody in Springvale. You used to like her. Tell me, do you care for her still? You could like somebody else just as well, couldn't you, Phil?"

I put my hand gently over her hand resting on my arm, and said nothing.

"Could you, Phil? She doesn't want you any more. How long will you care for her?"

"Till death us do part," I answered, in a low voice.

She dropped my arm, and even in the shadows I could see her eyes flash.

"I hate you," she cried, passionately.

"I don't blame you," I answered like a cold-blooded brute. "But, Rachel, this is the last time we shall be together. Let's be frank, now. You don't care for me. It is for the lack of one more scalp to dangle at your door that you grieve. You want me to do all the caring. You could forget me before we get home."

Then the tears came, a woman's sure weapon, and I hated myself more than she hated me.

"I can only wound your feelings, I always make you wretched. Now, Rachel, let's say good-bye to-night as the best of enemies and the worst of friends. I haven't made your stay in Kansas happy. You will forget me and remember only the pleasant people here."

When she bade me good-bye at her aunt's door, there was a harshness in her voice I had not noted before.

"If she really did care for me she wouldn't change so quickly. By Heaven, I believe there is something back of all this love-making. Charming a dog as he is, Phil Baronet in himself hasn't that much attraction for her," I concluded, and I breathed freer for the thought. When I came long afterwards to know the truth about her, I understood this sudden change, as I understood the charming pretensions to admiration and affection that preceded it.

The next day our command started on its campaign against the unknown dangers and hardships and suffering of the winter Plains. It was an imposing cavalcade that rode down the broad avenue of the capital city that November day when we began our march. Up from Camp Crawford we passed in regular order, mounted on our splendid horses, riding in platoon formation. At Fourth Street we swung south on Kansas Avenue. At the head of the column twenty-one buglers rode abreast, Bud Anderson and O'mie among them. Our Lieutenant-Colonel, Horace L. Moore, and his staff followed in order behind the buglers. Then came the cavalry, troop after troop, a thousand strong, in dignified military array, while from door and window, side-walk and side-street, the citizens watched our movements and cheered us as we passed. Six months later the remnants of that well-appointed regiment straggled into Topeka like stray dogs, and no demonstration was given over their return. But they had done their work, and in God's good time will come the day "to glean up their scattered ashes into History's golden urn."

A few miles out from Topeka we were overtaken by Governor Crawford. He had resigned the office of Chief Executive of Kansas to take command of our regiment. The lustre of the military pageantry began to fade by the time we had crossed the Wakarusa divide, and the capital city, nestling in its hill-girt valley by the side of the Kaw, was lost to our view. Ours was to be a campaign of endurance, of dogged patience, of slow, grinding inactivity, the kind of campaign that calls for every resource of courage and persistence from the soldier, giving him in return little of the inspiration that stimulates to conquest on battle fields. The years have come and gone, and what the Nineteenth Kansas men were called to do and to endure is only now coming into historical recognition.

Our introduction to what should befall us later came in the rainy weather, bitter winds, insufficient clothing, and limited rations of our journey before we reached Fort Beecher, on the Arkansas River. To-day, the beautiful city of Wichita marks the spot where the miserable little group of tents and low huts, called Fort Beecher, stood then. Fifty miles east of this fort we had passed the last house we were to see for half a year.

The Arkansas runs bottomside up across the Plains. Its waters are mainly under its bed, and it seems to wander aimlessly among the flat, lonely sand-bars, trying helplessly to get right again. Beyond this river we looked off into the Unknown. Somewhere back of the horizon in that shadowy illimitable Southwest General Sheridan had established a garrison on the Canadian River, and here General Custer and his Seventh United States Cavalry were waiting for us. They had forage for our horses and food and clothing for ourselves. We had left Topeka with limited supplies expecting sufficient reinforcement of food and grain at Fort Beecher to carry us safely forward until we should reach Camp Supply, Sheridan's stopping-place, wherever in the Southwest that might be. Then the two regiments, Custer's Seventh and the Kansas Nineteenth, were together to fall upon the lawless wild tribes and force them into submission.

Such was the prearranged plan of campaign, but disaster lay between us and this military force on the Canadian River. Neither the Nineteenth Cavalry commanders, the scouts, nor the soldiers knew a foot of that pathless mystery-shrouded, desolate land stretching away to the southward beyond the Arkansas River. We had only a meagre measure of rations, less of grain in proportion, and there was no military depot to which we could resort. The maps were all wrong, and in the trackless wastes and silent sand-dunes of the Cimarron country gaunt Starvation was waiting to clutch our vitals with its gnarled claws; while with all our nakedness and famine and peril, the winter blizzard, swirling its myriad whips of stinging cold came raging across the land and caught us in its icy grip.

I had learned on the Arickaree how men can face danger and defy death; I had only begun to learn how they can endure hardship.

It was mid-November when our regiment, led by Colonel Crawford, crossed the Arkansas River and struck out resolutely toward the southwest. Our orders were to join Custer's command at Sheridan's camp in the Indian Territory, possibly one hundred and fifty miles away. We must obey orders. It is the military man's creed. That we lacked rations, forage, clothing, and camp equipment must not deter us, albeit we had not guides, correct maps, or any knowledge of the land we were invading.

My first lesson in this campaign was the lesson of comradeship. My father had put me on a horse and I had felt at home when I was so short and fat my legs spread out on its back as if I were sitting on a floor. I was accounted a fair rider in Springvale. I had loved at first sight that beautiful sorrel creature whose bones were bleaching on the little island in Colorado, whose flesh a gnawing hunger had forced me to eat. But my real lessons in horsemanship began in Camp Crawford, with four jolly fellows whom I came to know and love in a way I shall never know or love other men—my comrades. Somebody struck home to the soldier heart ever more when he wrote:

There's many a bond in this world of ours, Ties of friendship, and wreaths of flowers, And true-lover's knots, I ween; The boy and girl are sealed with a kiss; But there's never a bond, old friend, like this,— We have drunk from the same canteen.

Such a bond is mine for these four comrades. Reed and Pete, Hadley and John Mac were their camp names, and I always think of them together. These four made a real cavalry man of me. It may be the mark of old age upon me now, for even to-day the handsome automobile and the great railway engine can command my admiration and awe; but the splendid thoroughbred, intelligent, and quivering with power, I can command and love.

The bond between the cavalry man and his mount is a strong one, and the spirit of the war-horse is as varied and sensitive as that of his rider. When our regiment had crossed the Arkansas River and was pushing its way grimly into the heart of the silent stretches of desolation, our horses grew nervous, and a restless homesickness possessed them. Troop A were great riders, and we were quick to note this uneasiness.

"What's the matter with these critters, Phil?" Reed, who rode next to me, asked as we settled into line one November morning.

"I don't know, Reed," I replied. "This one is a dead match for the horse I rode with Forsyth. The man that killed him laughed and said, 'There goes the last damned horse, anyhow.'"

"Just so it ain't the first's all I'm caring for. You'll be in luck if you have the last," the rider next to Reed declared.

"What makes you think so, John?" I inquired.

"Oh, that's John Mac for you," Reed said laughing. "He's homesick."

"No, it's the horses that's homesick," John Mac answered. "They've got horse sense and that's what some of us ain't got. They know they'll never get across the Arkansas River again."

"Cheerful prospect," I declared. "That means we'll never get across either, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yes," John answered grimly, "we'll get back all right. Don't know as this lot'd be any special ornament to kingdom come, anyhow; but we'll go through hell on the way comin' or goin'; now, mark me, Reed, and stop your idiotic grinning."

Whatever may have given this nervousness to the horses, so like a presentiment of coming ill, they were all possessed with the same spirit, and we remembered it afterwards when their bones were bleaching on the high flat lands long leagues beyond the limits of civilization.

The Plains had no welcoming smile for us. The November skies were clouded over, and a steady rain soaked the land with all its appurtenances, including a straggling command of a thousand men floundering along day after day among the crooked canyons and gloomy sandhills of the Cimarron country. In vain we tried to find a trail that should lead us to Sheridan's headquarters at Camp Supply, on the Canadian River. Then the blizzard had its turn with us. Suddenly, as is the blizzard's habit, it came upon us, sheathing our rain-sodden clothing in ice. Like a cloudburst of summer was this winter cloudburst of snow, burying every trail and covering every landmark with a mocking smoothness. Then the mercury fell, and a bitter wind swept the open Plains.

We had left Fort Beecher with five days' rations and three days' forage. Seven days later we went into bivouac on a crooked little stream that empties its salty waters into the Cimarron. It was a moonless, freezing night. Fires were impossible, for there was no wood, and the buffalo chips soaked with rain were frozen now and buried under the snow. A furious wind threshed the earth; the mercury hovered about the zero mark. Alkali and salt waters fill the streams of that land, and our food supply was a memory two days old.

How precious a horse can become, the Plains have taught us. The man on foot out there is doomed. All through this black night of perishing cold we clung to our frightened, freezing, starving horses. We had put our own blankets about them, and all night long we led them up and down. The roar of the storm, the confusion from the darkness, the frenzy from hunger drove them frantic. A stampede among them there would have meant instant death to many of us, and untold suffering to the dismounted remainder. How slowly the cold, bitter hours went by! I had thought the burning heat of the Colorado September unendurable. I wondered in that time of freezing torment if I should ever again call the heat a burden.

There were five of us tramping together in one little circle that night—Reed and John Mac, and Pete and Hadley, with myself. In all the garrison I came to know these four men best. They were near my own age; their happy-go-lucky spirit and their cheery laughter were food and drink. They proved to me over and over how kind-hearted a soldier can be, and how hard it is to conquer a man who wills himself unconquerable. Without these four I think I should never have gotten through that night.

Morning broke on our wretched camp at last, and we took up the day's march, battling with cold and hunger over every foot of ground. On the tenth day after we crossed the Arkansas River the crisis came. Our army clothes were waiting for us at Camp Supply. Rain and ice and the rough usage of camp life had made us ragged already, and our shoes were worn out. And still the cold and storm stayed with us. We wrapped pieces of buffalo hide about our bare feet and bound the horses' nose-bags on them in lieu of cavalry boots. Our blankets we had donated to our mounts, and we had only dog tents, well adapted to ventilation, but a very mockery at sheltering.

Our provisions were sometimes reduced to a few little cubes of sugar doled out to each from the officers' stores. The buffalo, by which we had augmented our food supply, were gone now to any shelter whither instinct led them. It was rare that even a lone forsaken old bull of the herd could be found in some more sheltered spot.

At last with hungry men and frenzied horses, with all sense of direction lost, with a deep covering of snow enshrouding the earth, and a merciless cold cutting straight to the life centres, we went into camp on the tenth night in a little ravine running into Sand Creek, another Cimarron tributary, in the Indian Territory. We were unable to move any farther. For ten days we had been on the firing line, with hunger and cold for our unconquerable foes. We could have fought Indians even to the death. But the demand on us was for endurance. It is a woman's province to suffer and wait and bear. We were men, fighting men, but ours was the struggle of resisting, not attacking, and the tenth night found us vanquished. Somebody must come to our rescue now. We could not save ourselves. In the dangerous dark and cold, to an unknown place, over an unknown way, somebody must go for us, somebody must be the sacrifice, or we must all perish. The man who went out from the camp on Sand Creek that night was one of the two men I had seen rise up from the sand-pits of the Arickaree Island and start out in the blackness and the peril to carry our cry to Fort Wallace—Pliley, whose name our State must sometime set large in her well-founded, well-written story.

With fifty picked men and horses he went for our sakes, and more, aye, more than he ever would claim for himself. He was carrying rescue to homes yet to be, he was winning the frontier from peril, he was paying the price for the prairie kingdom whose throne and altar are the hearthstone.

"Camp Starvation," we christened our miserable, snow-besieged stopping-place. We had fire but we were starving for food. Our horses were like wild beasts in their ravenous hunger, tearing the clothing from the men who came too carelessly near to their rope tethers.

That splendid group of mounts that had pranced proudly down Kansas Avenue less than a month before, moving on now nearly seven days without food, dying of cruel starvation, made a feature of this tragical winter campaign that still puts an ache into my soul. Long ago I lost most of the sentiment out of my life, but I have never seen a hungry horse since that Winter of '68 that I let go unfed if it lay within my power to bring it food.

The camp was well named. It was Hadley and Reed and Pete and John Mac, that good-natured quartet, who stood sponsors for that title. We were a pitiful lot of fellows in this garrison. We mixed the handful of flour given to us with snow water, and, wrapping the unsalted dough around a sagebrush spike, we cooked it in the flames, and ate it from the stick, as a dog would gnaw a bone. The officers put a guard around the few little hackberry trees to keep the men from eating the berries and the bark. Not a scrap of the few buffalo we found was wasted. Even the entrails cleansed in the snow and eaten raw gives hint of how hungry we were.

At last in our dire extremity it was decided to choose five hundred of the strongest men and horses to start under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Horace L. Moore, without food or tents, through the snow toward the Beulah Land of Camp Supply. Pliley had been gone for three days. We had no means of knowing whether his little company had found Sheridan's Camp or were lost in the pathless snows of a featureless land, and we could not hold out much longer.

I was among the company of the fittest chosen to make this journey. I was not yet twenty-two, built broad and firm, and with all the heritage of the strength and endurance of the Baronet blood, I had a power of resistance and recoil from conditions that was marvellous to the veterans in our regiment.

It was mid-forenoon of the fifth of November when the Nineteenth Kansas moved out of Camp Crawford by the Shunganunga and marched proudly down the main thoroughfare of Topeka at the auspicious beginning of its campaign. Twenty days later, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore again headed a marching column, this time, moving out of Camp Starvation on Sand Creek—five hundred ragged, hungry men with famishing horses, bearing no supplies, going, they could only guess whither, and unable even to surmise how many days and nights the going would consume. It was well for me that I had an ideal. I should have gone mad otherwise, for I was never meant for the roving chance life of a Plains scout.

When our division made its tentless bivouac with the sky for a covering on the first night out beyond the Cimarron River from Camp Starvation, the mercury was twenty degrees below zero. Even a heart that could pump blood like mine could hardly keep the fires of the body from going out. There was a full moon somewhere up in the cold, desolate heavens lighting up a frozen desolate land. I shiver even now at the picture my memory calls up. In the midst of that night's bitter chill came a dream of home, of the warm waters of the Neosho on August afternoons, of the sunny draw, and—Marjie. Her arms were about my neck, her curly head was nestling against my shoulder, the little ringlets about her temples touched my cheek. I lifted her face to kiss her, but a soft shadowy darkness crept between us, and I seemed to be sinking into it deeper and deeper. It grew so black I longed to give up and let it engulf me. It was so easy a thing to do.

Then in a blind stupidity I began to hear a voice in my ears, and to find myself lunging back and forth and stumbling lamely on my left foot. The right foot had no feeling, no power of motion, and I forgot that I had it.

"What are you doing, Pete?" I asked, when I recognized who it was that was holding me.

Pete was like an elder brother, always doing me a kind service.

"Trying to keep you from freezing to death," he replied.

"Oh, let me go. It's so easy," I answered back drowsily.

"By golly, I've a notion to do it." Pete's laugh was a tonic in itself. "Here you and your horse are both down, and you can't stand on one of your feet. I'll bet it's froze, and you about to go over the River; and when a fellow tries to pull you back you say, 'Oh, let me go!' You darned renegade! you ought to go."

He was doing his best for me all the time, and he had begun none too soon, for Death had swooped down near me, and I was ready to give up the struggle. The warmth of the horse's body had saved one foot, but as to the other—the little limp I shall always have had its beginning in that night's work.

The next day was Thanksgiving, although we did not know it. There are no holy days or gala days to men who are famishing. That day the command had no food except the few hackberries we found and the bark of the trees we gnawed upon. It was the hardest day of all the march.

Pete, who had pulled me back from the valley of the shadow the night before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing became his Thanksgiving turkey.

The second night was bitterly cold, and then came a third day of struggling through deep snows on hilly prairies, and across canyon-guarded bridgeless streams. The milestones of our way were the poor bodies of our troop horses that had given up the struggle, while their riders pushed resolutely forward.

On the fourth day out from Camp Starvation we came at sundown to the edge of a low bluff, beyond which lay a fertile valley. If Paradise at life's eventide shall look as good to me, it will be worth all the cares of the journey to make an abundant entrance therein.

Out of the bitter cold and dreary snow fields, trackless and treeless, whereon we had wandered starving and uncertain, we looked down on a broad wooded valley sheltering everything within it. Two converging streams glistening in the evening light lay like great bands of silver down this valley's length. Below us gleamed the white tents of Sheridan's garrison, while high above them the Stars and Stripes in silent dignity floated lightly in the gentle breeze of sunset.

That night I slept under a snug tent on a soft bed of hay. And again I dreamed as I had dreamed long ago of the two strange women whom I was struggling to free from a great peril.

General Sheridan had expected the Kansas regiment to make the journey from Fort Beecher on the Arkansas to his station on the Canadian River in four or five days. Our detachment of five hundred men had covered it in fourteen days, but we had done it on five days' rations, and three days' forage. Small wonder that our fine horses had fallen by the way. It is only the human organism backed by a soul, that can suffer and endure.

Pliley and his fifty men who had left us the night we went into camp on Sand Creek had reached Sheridan three days in advance of us, and already relief was on its way to those whom we had left beyond the snow-beleaguered canyons of the Cimarron. The whole of our regiment was soon brought in and this part of the journey and its hardships became but a memory. Official war reports account only for things done. No record is kept of the cost of effort. The glory is all for the battle lists of the killed or wounded, and yet I account it the one heroic thing of my life that I was a Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry man through that November of 1868 on the Plains.



CHAPTER XXIII

IN JEAN'S LAND

All these regiments made history and left records of unfading glory.

While the Kansas volunteers had been floundering in the snow-heaped sand-dunes of the Cimarron country, General Sheridan's anxiety for our safety grew to gravest fears. General Custer's feeling was that of impatience mingled with anxiety. He knew the tribes were getting farther away with every twenty-four hours' delay, and he shaped his forces for a speedy movement southward. The young general's military genius was as strong in minute detail as in general scope. His command was well directed. Enlisted under him were a daring company of Osage scouts, led by Hard Rope and Little Beaver, two of the best of this ever loyal tribe. Forty sharpshooters under Colonel Cook, and a company of citizen scouts recruited by their commanding officer, Pepoon, were added to the regular soldiery of the Seventh Cavalry.

These citizen scouts had been gathered from the Kansas river valleys. They knew why they had come hither. Each man had his own tragic picture of the Plains. They were a silent determined force which any enemy might dread, for they had a purpose to accomplish—even the redemption of the prairie from its awful peril.

The November days had slipped by without our regiment's appearance. The finding of an Indian trail toward the southwest caused Sheridan to loose Custer from further delay. Eagerly then he led forth his willing command out of Camp Supply and down the trail toward the Washita Valley, determined to begin at once on the winter's work.

The blizzard that had swept across the land had caught the Indian tribes on their way to the coverts of the Wichita Mountains, and forced them into winter quarters. The villages of the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, and the Arapahoe extended up and down the sheltering valley of the Washita for many miles. Here were Black Kettle and his band of Cheyenne braves—they of the loving heart at Fort Hays, they who had filled all the fair northern prairie lands with terror, whose hands reeked with the hot blood of the white brothers they professed to love. In their snug tepees were their squaws, fat and warm, well clothed and well fed. Dangling from the lodge poles were scalps with the soft golden curls of babyhood. No comfort of savage life was lacking to the papooses here. And yet, in the same blizzards wherein we had struggled and starved, half a score of little white children torn from their mothers' clinging arms, these Indians had allowed to freeze to death out on the Plains, while the tribes were hurrying through the storm to the valley. The fathers of some of these lost children were in that silent company under Pepoon, marching now with the Seventh Cavalry down upon the snow-draped tepees of Black Kettle and his tribe.

Oh, the cost of it all! The price paid out for a beautiful land and sheltered homes, and school privileges and Sabbath blessings! It was for these that men fought and starved and dared, and at last died, leaving only a long-faded ripple in the prairie sod where an unmarked grave holds human dust returned to the dust of the earth.

In the shelter of the Washita Valley on that twenty-seventh day of November, God's vengeance came to these Indians at the hands of General Custer. He had approached their village undiscovered. As the Indians had swooped down on Forsyth's sleeping force; as the yells of Black Kettle's braves had startled the sleeping settlers at dawn on Spillman Creek, the daybreak now marked the beginning of retribution. While the Seventh Cavalry band played "Garry Owen" as a signal for closing in, Custer's soldiery, having surrounded the village, fell upon it and utterly destroyed it. Black Kettle and many of his braves were slain, the tepees were burned, the Indians' ponies were slaughtered, and the squaws and children made captives.

News of this engagement reached Sheridan's garrison on the day after our arrival, with the word also that Custer, unable to cope with the tribes swarming down the Washita River, was returning to Camp Supply with his spoils of battle.

"Did you know, Phil," Bud Anderson said, "that Cuthter'th to have a grand review before the General and hith thtaff when he geth here to-morrow, and that'th all we'll thee of the thircuth. My! but I wish we could have been in that fight; don't you?"

"I don't know, Bud, I'd hate to come down here for nothing, after all we've gone through; but don't you worry about that; there'll be plenty to be done before the whole Cheyenne gang is finished."

"It'll be a sight worth seein' anyhow, this parade," O'mie declared. "Do you remember the day Judge Baronet took his squad out av Springvale, Phil? What a careless set av young idiots we were then?"

Did I remember? Could I be the same boy that watched that line of blue-coats file out of Springvale and across the rocky ford of the Neosho that summer day? It seemed so long ago; and this snow-clad valley seemed the earth's end from that warm sunny village. But Custer's review was to come, and I should see it.

It was years ago that this review was made, and I who write of it have had many things crowded into the memory of each year. And yet, I recall as if it were but yesterday that parade of a Plains military review. It was a magnificent sunlit day. The Canadian Valley, smooth and white with snow, rose gently toward the hills of the southwest. Across this slope of gleaming whiteness came Custer's command, and we who watched it saw one of those bits of dramatic display rare even among the stirring incidents of war.

Down across the swell, led by Hard Rope and Little Beaver, came the Osage scouts tricked out in all the fantastic gear of Indian war coloring, riding hard, as Indians ride, cutting circles in the snow, firing shots into the air, and chanting their battle songs of victory. Behind them came Pepoon's citizen scouts. Men with whom I had marched and fought on the Arickaree were in that stern, silent company, and my heart thumped hard as I watched them swinging down the line.

And then that splendid cavalry band swept down the slope riding abreast, their instruments glistening in the sunlight, and their horses stepping proudly to the music as the strains of "Garry Owen to Glory" filled the valley.

Behind the band were the prisoners of war, the Cheyenne widows and orphans of Black Kettle's village riding on their own ponies in an irregular huddle, their bright blankets and Indian trinkets of dress making a division in that parade, the mark of the untrained and uncivilized. After these were the sharpshooters led by their commander, Cook, and then—we had been holding our breath for this—then rode by column after column in perfect order, dressed to the last point of military discipline, that magnificent Seventh Cavalry, the flower of the nation's soldiery, sent out to subdue the Plains. At their head was their commander, a slender young man of twenty-nine summers, lacking much the fine physique one pictures in a leader of soldiers. But his face, from which a tangle of long yellow curls fell back, had in it the mark of a master.

This parade was not without its effect on us, to whom the ways of war were new. Well has George Eliot declared "there have been no great nations without processions." The unwritten influence of that thrilling act of dramatic display somehow put a stir in the blood and loyalty and patriotism took stronger hold on us.

We had come out to break the red man's power by a winter invasion. Camp Supply was abandoned, and the whole body made its way southward to Fort Cobb. To me ours seemed a tremendous force. We were two thousand soldiers, with commanders, camp officials, and servants. Our wagon train had four hundred big Government wagons, each drawn by six mules. We trailed across the Plains leaving a wide and well marked path where twenty-five hundred cavalry horses, with as many mules, tramped the snow.

The December of the year 1868 was a terror on the Plains. No fiercer blizzard ever blew out of the home of blizzards than the storms that fell upon us on the southward march.

Down in the Washita Valley we came to the scene of Custer's late encounter. Beyond it was a string of recently abandoned villages clustering down the river in the sheltering groves where had dwelt Kiowa, Arapahoe, and Comanche, from whose return fire Custer saved himself by his speedy retreat northward after his battle with Black Kettle's band.

A little company of us were detailed to investigate these deserted quarters. The battle field had a few frozen bodies of Indians who had been left by the tribe in their flight before the attack of the Seventh Cavalry. There were also naked forms of white soldiers who had met death here. In the villages farther on were heaps of belongings of every description, showing how hasty the exodus had been. In one of these villages I dragged the covering from a fallen snow-covered tepee. Crouched down in its lowest place was the body of a man, dead, with a knife wound in the back.

"Poor coward! he tried hard to get away," Bud exclaimed.

"Some bigger coward tried to make a shield out of him, I'll guess," I replied, lifting the stiff form with more carefulness than sentiment. As I turned the body about, I caught sight of the face, which even in death was marked with craven terror. It was the face of the Rev. Mr. Dodd, pastor of the Springvale Methodist Church South. In his clenched dead hands he still held a torn and twisted blanket. It was red, with a circle of white in the centre.

On the desolate wind-swept edge of a Kiowa village Bud and I came upon the frozen body of a young white woman. Near her lay her two-year-old baby boy. With her little one, she had been murdered to prevent her rescue, on the morning of Custer's attack on the Cheyennes, murdered with the music of the cavalry band sounding down the valley, and with the shouts and shots of her own people, ringing a promise of life and hope to her.

Bud hadn't been with Forsyth, and he was not quite ready for this. He stooped and stroked the woman's hair tenderly and then lifted a white face up toward me. "It would have happened to Marjie, Phil, long ago, but for O'mie. They were Kiowath, too," he said in a low voice.

After that moment there was no more doubt for me. I knew why I had been spared in Colorado, and I consecrated myself to the fighting duty of an American citizen, "Through famine and fire and frost," I vowed to myself, "I give my strength to this work, even unto death if God wills it."

Tenderly, for soldiers can be tender, the body of the mother and her baby were wrapped in a blanket and placed in one of the wagons, to be carried many miles and to wait many days before they were laid to rest at last in the shadow of Fort Arbuckle.

I saw much of O'mie. In the army as in Springvale, he was everybody's friend. But the bitter winter did not alleviate that little hacking cough of his. Instead of the mild vigor of the sunny Plains, that we had looked for was the icy blast with its penetrating cold, as sudden in its approach as it was terrible in its violence. Sometimes even now on winter nights when the storms sweep across the west prairie and I hear them hurl their wrathful strength against this stanch stone house with its rounded turret-like corners, I remember how the wind blew over our bivouacs, and how we burrowed like prairie dogs in the river bank, where the battle with the storm had only one parallel in all this campaign. That other battle comes later.

But with all and all we could live and laugh, and I still bless the men, Reed and Hadley and John Mac and Pete, whose storm cave was near mine. Without the loud, cheery laugh from their nest I should have died. But nobody said "die." Troop A had the courage of its convictions and a breezy sense of the ludicrous. I think I could turn back at Heaven's gate to wait for the men who went across the Plains together in that year of Indian warfare.

This is only one man's story. It is not an official report. The books of history tell minutely how the scattered tribes submitted. Overwhelmed by the capture of their chief men, on our march to Fort Cobb, induced partly by threatened danger to these captive chiefs, but mostly by bewilderment at the presence of such a large force in their country in midwinter, after much stratagem and time-gaining delays they came at last to the white commander's terms, and pitched their tepees just beyond our camp. Only one tribe remained unsubdued: the Cheyennes, who with trick and lie, had managed to elude all the forces and escape to the southwest.

We did not stay long at Fort Cobb. The first week of the new year found us in a pleasanter place, on the present site of Fort Sill. It was not until after the garrison was settled here that I saw much of these Indian tribes, whom Custer's victory on the Washita, and diplomatic handling of affairs afterwards, had brought into villages under the guns of our cantonment.

I knew that Satanta and Lone Wolf, chief men of the Kiowas, were held as hostages, but I had not been near them. Satanta was the brute for whom the dead woman with her little one had been captured. Her form was mouldering back to earth in her grave at Fort Arbuckle, while he, well clothed and well fed, was a gentleman prisoner of war in a comfortable lodge in our midst.

The East knew little of the Plains before the railroads crossed them. Eastern religious papers and church mission secretaries lauded Satanta as a hero, and Black Kettle, whom Custer had slain, as a martyr; while they urged that the extreme penalty of the civil law be meted out to Custer and Sheridan in particular, and to the rest of us at wholesale.

One evening I was sent by an officer on some small errand to Satanta's tent. The chief had just risen from his skin couch, and a long band of black fur lay across his head. In the dim light it gave his receding forehead a sort of square-cut effect. He threw it off as I entered, but the impression it made I could not at once throw off. The face of the chief was for the moment as suggestive of Jean Pahusca's face as ever Father Le Claire's had been.

"If Jean is a Kiowa," I said to myself, "then this scoundrel here must be his mother's brother." I had only a few words with the man, but a certain play of light on his cunning countenance kept Jean in my mind continually.

When I turned to go, the tent flap was pulled back for me from the outside and I stepped forth and stood face to face with Jean Pahusca himself, standing stolidly before me wrapped in a bright new red blanket. We looked at each other steadily.

"You are in my land now. This isn't Springvale." There was still that French softness in his voice that made it musical, but the face was cruel with a still relentless, deadly cruelty that I had never seen before even in his worst moods.

The Baronets are not cowardly by nature, but something in Jean always made me even more fearless. To his taunting words, "This isn't Springvale," I replied evenly, "No, but this is Phil Baronet still."

He gave me a swift searching look, and turning, disappeared in the shadows beyond the tents.

"I owe him a score for his Arickaree plans," I said to myself, "and his scalp ought to come off to O'mie for his attempt to murder the boy in the Hermit's Cave. Oh, it's a grim game this. I hope it will end here soon."

As I turned away I fell against Hard Rope, chief of the Osage scouts. I had seen little of him before, but from this time on he shadowed my pathway with a persistence I had occasion to remember when the soldier life was forgotten.

The beginning of the end was nearer than I had wished for. All about Fort Sill the bluffy heights looked down on pleasant little valleys. White oak timber and green grass made these little parks a delight to the eye. The soldiers penetrated all the shelving cliffs about them in search of game and time-killing leisure.

The great lack of the soldier's day is seclusion. The mess life and tent life and field life may develop comradeship, but it cannot develop individuality. The loneliness of the soldier is in the barracks, not in the brief time he may be by himself.

Beyond a little brook Bud and I had by merest chance found a small cove in the low cliff looking out on one of these valleys, a secluded nook entered by a steep, short climb. We kept the place a secret and called it our sanctuary. Here on the winter afternoons we sat in the warm sunshine sheltered from the winds by the rocky shelf, and talked of home and the past; and sometimes, but not often, of the future. On the day after I saw Jean at the door of Satanta's tent, Bud stole my cap and made off to our sanctuary. I had adorned it with turkey quills, and made a fantastic head-gear out of it. Soldiers do anything to kill time; and jokes and pranks and child's play, stale and silly enough in civil life, pass for fun in lieu of better things in camp.

It was a warm afternoon in February, and the soldiers were scattered about the valley hunting, killing rattlesnakes that the sunshine had tempted out on the rocks before their cave hiding-places, or tramping up and down about the river banks. Hearing my name called, I looked out, only to see Bud disappearing and John Mac, who had mistaken him for me, calling after him. John Mac, leading the other three, Hadley and Reed and Pete, each with his hands on the shoulders of the one before him, were marching in locked step across the open space.

"The rascal's heading for the sanctuary," I said to myself. "I'll follow and surprise him."

I had nearly reached the foot of the low bluff when a pistol shot, clear and sharp, sounded out; and I thought I heard a smothered cry in the direction Bud had taken. "Somebody hunting turkey or killing snakes," was my mental comment. Rifles and revolvers were popping here and there, telling that the boys were out on a hunting bout or at target practice. As I rounded a huge bowlder, beyond which the little climb to our cove began, I saw Bud staggering toward me. At the same time half a dozen of the boys, Pete and Reed and John Mac among them, came hurrying around the angle of another projecting rock shelf.

Bud's face was pallid, and his blue eyes were full of pathos. I leaped toward him, and he fell into my arms. A hole in his coat above his heart told the story,—a bullet and internal bleeding. I stretched him out on the grassy bank and the soldiers gathered around him.

"Somebody's made an awful mistake," John Mac said bitterly. "The boys are hunting over on the other side of the bluff. We heard them shooting turkey, and then we heard one shot and a scream. The boys don't know what they've done."

"I'm glad they don't," I murmured.

"We were back there; you can't get down in front," Reed said. They did not know of our little nest on the front side of the bluff.

"I'm all right, Phil," Bud said, and smiled up at me and reached for my hand. "I'm glad you didn't come. I told O'mie latht night where to find it." And then his mind wandered, and he began to talk of home.

"Run for the surgeon, somebody," one of the boys urged; and John Mac was off at the word.

"It ain't no use," Pete declared, kneeling beside the wounded boy. "He's got no need for a surgeon."

And I knew he was right. I had seen the same thing before on reeking sands under a blazing September sky.

I took the boy's head in my lap and held his hand and stroked that shock of yellow hair. He thought he was at Springvale and we were in the Deep Hole below the Hermit's Cave. He gripped my hand tightly and begged me not to let him go down. It did not last long. He soon looked up and smiled.

"I'm thafe," he lisped. "Your turn, now, Phil."

The soldiers had fallen back and left us two together. John Mac and Reed had hastened to the cantonment for help, but Pete knew best. It was useless. Even now, after the lapse of nearly forty years, the sorrow of that day lies heavy on me. "Accidental death" the official record was made, and there was no need to change it, when we knew better.

That evening O'mie and I sat together in the shadowy twilight. There was just a hint of spring in the balmy air, and we breathed deeply, realizing, as never before, how easy a thing it is to cut off the breath of life. We talked of Bud in gentle tones, and then O'mie said: "Lem me tell you somethin', Phil. I was over among the Arapahoes this afternoon, an' I saw a man, just a glimpse was all; but you never see a face so like Father Le Claire's in your life. It couldn't be nobody else but that praist; and yet, it couldn't be him, nather."

"Why, O'mie?" I asked.

"It was an evil-soaked face. And yet it was fine-lookin'. It was just like Father Le Claire turned bad."

"Maybe it was Father Le Claire himself turned bad," I said. "I saw the same man up on the Arickaree, voice and all. Men sometimes lead double lives. I never thought that of him. But who is this shadow of Jean Pahusca's—a priest in civilization, a renegade on the Plains? Not only the face and voice of the man I saw, but his gait, the set of his shoulders, all were Le Claire to a wrinkle."

"Phil, it couldn't have been him in September. The praist was at Springvale then, and he went out on Dever's stage white and sick, hurrying to Kansas City. Oh, begorra, there's a few extry folks more 'n I can use in this world, annyhow."

We sat in silence a few minutes, the shadow of the bowlder concealing us. I was just about to rise when two men came soft-footed out of the darkness from beyond the cliff. Passing near us they made their way along the little stream toward the river. They were talking in low tones and we caught only a sentence or two.

"When are you going to leave?" It was Jean Pahusca's voice.

"Not till I get ready."

The tone had that rich softness I heard so often when Father Le Claire chatted with our gang of boys in Springvale, but there was an insolence in it impossible to the priest. O'mie squeezed my hand in the dark and rising quickly he followed them down the stream. The boy never did know what fear meant. They were soon lost in the darkness and I waited for O'mie's return. He came presently, running swiftly and careless of the noise he made. Beyond, I heard the feet of a horse in a gallop, a sound the bluff soon shut off.

"Come, Phil, let's get into camp double quick for the love av all the saints."

Inside the cantonment we stopped for breath, and as soon as we could be alone, O'mie explained.

"Whoiver that man with Jean was, he's a 'was' now for good. Jean fixed him."

"Tell me, O'mie, what's he done?" I asked eagerly.

"They seemed to be quarrellin'. I heard Jean say, 'You can't get off too quick; Satanta has got men hired to scalp you; now take my word.' An' the Le Claire one laughed, oh, hateful as anything could be, and says, 'I'm not afraid of Satanta. He's a prisoner.' Bedad! but his voice is like the praist's. They're too much alike to be two and too different somehow to be one. But Phil, d'ye know that in the rumpus av Custer's wid Black Kittle, Jean stole old Satanta's youngest wife and made off wid her, and wid his customary cussedness let her freeze to death in them awful storms. Now he's layin' the crime on this praist-renegade and trying to git the Kiowas to scalp the holy villain. That's the row as I made it out between 'em. They quarrelled wid each other quite fierce, and the Imitation says, 'You are Satanta's tool yourself'; and Jean said somethin' I couldn't hear. Then the Imitation struck at him. It was dark, but I heard a groan and something like the big man went plunk into the river. Then Jean made a dash by me, and he's on a horse now, and a mile beyont the South Pole by this time. 'Tain't no pony, I bet you, but a big cavalry horse he's stole. He put a knife into what went into the river, so it won't come out. That Imitation isn't Le Claire, but nather is he anybody else now. Phil, d'ye reckon this will iver be a dacent civilized country? D'ye reckon these valleys will iver have orchards and cornfields and church steeples and schoolhouses in 'em, and little homes, wid children playin' round 'em not afraid av their lives?"

"I don't know," I answered, "but orchards and cornfields and church steeples and schoolhouses and little homes with children unafraid, have been creeping across America for a hundred years and more."

"So they have; but oh, the cost av it all! The Government puts the land at a dollar and a quarter an acre, wid your courage and fightin' strength and quickest wits, and by and by your heart's blood and a grave wid no top cover, like a fruit tart, sometimes, let alone a tomb-stone, as the total cost av the prairie sod. It's a great story now, aven if nobody should care to read it in a gineration or so."

So O'mie philosophized and I sat listening, whittling the while a piece of soft pine, the broken end of a cracker box.

"Now, Phil, where did you get that knife?" O'mie asked suddenly.

"That's the knife I found in the Hermit's Cave one May day nearly six years ago, when I went down there after a lazy red-headed Irishman. I found it to-day down in my Saratoga trunk. See the name?" I pointed to the script lettering, spelling out slowly—"Jean Le Claire."

"Well, give it to me. I got it away from the 'good Injun' first." O'mie deftly wrenched it out of my hand. "Let me kape it, Phil. I've a sort of fore-warnin' I may nade it soon."

"Keep it if you want to, you grasping son of Erin," I replied carelessly.

We were talking idly now, to hide the heaviness of our sorrow as we thought of Bud down under the clods, whose going had left us two so lonely and homesick.

Two days later when I found time to slip away to our sanctuary and be alone for a little while, my eye fell upon my feather-decked hat, crushed and shapeless as if it had been trampled on, lying just at the corner where I came into the nook. I turned it listlessly in my hands and stood wrapped in sorrowful thought. A low chuckle broke the spell, and at the same moment a lariat whizzed through the air and encircled my body. A jerk and I was thrown to the ground, my arms held to my sides. Almost before I could begin to struggle the coils of the rope were deftly bound about me and I was helpless as a mummy. Then Jean Pahusca, deliberate, cruel, mocking, sat down beside me. The gray afternoon was growing late, and the sun was showing through the thin clouds in the west. Down below us was a beautiful little park with its grove of white-oak trees, and beyond was the river. I could see it all as I lay on the sloping shelf of stone—the sky, and the grove and the bit of river with the Arapahoe and Kiowa tepees under the shadow of the fort, and the flag floating lazily above the garrison's tents. It was a peaceful scene, but near me was an enemy cutting me off from all this serenity and safety. In his own time he spoke deliberately. He had sat long preparing his thought.

"Phil Baronet, you may know now you are at the end of your game. I have waited long. An Indian learns to wait. I have waited ever since the night you put the pink flowers on her head—Star-face's. You are strong, you are not afraid, you are quick and cunning, you are lucky. But you are in my land now. You have no more strength, and your cunning and courage and luck are useless. They don't know where you are. They don't know about this place." He pointed toward the tents as he spoke. "When they do find you, you won't do them any good." He laughed mockingly but not unmusically. "They'll say, 'accidental death by hunters,' as they said of Bud. Bah! I was fooled by his hat. I thought he was you. But he deserved it, anyhow."

So that was what had cut him off. Innocent Bud! wantonly slain, by one the law might never reach. The thought hurt worse than the thongs that bound me.

"Before I finish with you I'll let you have more time to think, and here is something to think about. It was given to me by a girl who loved you, or thought she did. She found it in a hole in the rock where Star-face had put it. Do you know the writing?"

He held a letter before my eyes. In Marjie's well known hand I read the inscription, "Philip Baronet, Rockport, Cliff Street."

"It's a letter Star-face put in the place you two had for a long time. I never could find it, but Lettie did. She gave it to me. There was another letter deeper in, but this was the only one she could get out. Her arm was too short. Star-face and Amos Judson were married Christmas Day. You didn't know that."

How cruelly slow he was, but it was useless to say a word. He had no heart. No plea for mercy would move him to anything but fiendish joy that he could call it forth. At last he opened the letter and read aloud. He was a good reader. All his schooling had developed his power over the English language, but it gave him nothing else.

Slowly he read, giving me time to think between the sentences. It was the long loving letter Marjie wrote to me on the afternoon that Rachel and I went to the old stone cabin together. It told me all the stories she had heard, and it assured me that in spite of them all her faith in me was unshaken.

"I know you, Phil," she had written at the end, "and I know that you are all my own."

I understood everything now. Oh, if I must die, it was sweet to hear those words. She had not gotten my letter. She had heard all the misrepresentation, and she knew all the circumstances entangling everything. What had become of my letter made no difference; it was lost. But she loved me still. And I who should have read this letter out on "Rockport" in the August sunset, I was listening to it now out on this gray rock in a lonely land as I lay bound for the death awaiting me. But the reading brought joy. Jean watching my face saw his mistake and he cursed me in his anger.

"You care so much for another man's wife? So! I can drive away your happiness as easily as I brought it to you," he argued. "I go back to Springvale. Nobody knows when I go. Bud's out of the way; O'mie won't be there. Suddenly, silently, I steal upon Star-face when she least thinks of me. I would have been good to her five years ago. I can get her away long and long before anybody will know it. Tell Mapleson will help me sure. Now I sell her, on time, to one buck. When I get ready I redeem her, and sell her to another. You know that woman you and Bud found in Satanta's tepee on the Washita? I killed her myself. The soldiers went by five minutes afterwards,—she was that near getting away. That's what Star-face will come to by and by. Satanta is my mother's brother. I can surpass him. I know your English ways also. When you die a little later, remember what Star-face is coming to. When I get ready I will torture her to death. You couldn't escape me. No more can she. Remember it!"

The sun was low in the west now, and the pain of my bonds was hard to bear, but this slow torture of mind made them welcome. They helped me not to think. After a long silence Jean turned his face full toward me. I had not spoken a word since his first quick binding of my limbs.

"When the last pink is in the sky your time will come," he laughed. "And nobody will know. I'll leave you where the hunter accidentally shot you. Watch that sunset and think of home."

He shoved me rudely about that I might see the western sky and the level rays of the sun, as it sank lower and lower. I had faced death before. I must do it sometime, once for all. But life was very dear to me. Home and Marjie's love. Oh, the burden of the days had been more grievous than I had dreamed, now that I understood. And all the time the sun was sinking. Keeping well in the shadow that no eye from below might see him, Jean walked toward the edge of the shelf.

"It will be down in a minute more; look and see," he said, in that soft tone that veiled a fiend's purpose. Then he turned away, and glancing out over the valley he made a gesture of defiance at the cantonment. His back was toward me. The red sun was on the horizon bar, half out of sight.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." The arm of the All Father was round about me then, and I put my trust in Him.

As Jean turned to face the west the glow of the sinking ball of fire dazzled his eyes a moment. But that was long enough, for in that instant a step fell on the rock beside me. A leap of lightning swiftness put a form between my eyes and the dying day; the flash of a knife—Jean Le Claire's short sharp knife—glittered here; my bonds were cut in a twinkling; O'mie, red-headed Irish O'mie, lifted me to my feet, and I was free.



CHAPTER XXIV

THE CRY OF WOMANHOOD

The women have no voice to speak, but none can check your pen— Turn for a moment from your strife and plead their cause, O men!

—KIPLING.

After all, it was not Tillhurst, but Jim Conlow, who had a Topeka story to tell when he went back to Springvale; and it was Lettie who edited and published her brother's story. Lettie had taken on a new degree of social importance with her elevation to a clerkship in Judson's store, and she was quick to take advantage of it.

Tillhurst, when he found his case, like my own, was hopeless with Marjie, preferred that Rachel's name and mine should not be linked together. Also a degree of intimacy had developed suddenly between Tell Mapleson and the young teacher. The latter had nothing to add when Lettie enlarged on Rachel's preference for me and my devotion to her while the Nineteenth Kansas was mobilizing in Topeka.

"And everybody knows," Lettie would declare, "that she's got the money, and Phil will never marry a poor girl. No, sir! No Baronet's going to do that."

Although it was only Lettie who said it, yet the impression went about and fixed itself somehow, that I had given myself over to a life of luxury. I, who at this very time was starving of hunger and almost perishing of cold in a bleak wind-swept land. And to me for all this, there were neither riches nor glory, nor love.

Springvale was very gay that winter. Two young lawyers from Michigan, fresh from the universities, set up a new firm over Judson's store where my father's office had been before "we planted him in the courthouse, where he belongs," as Cam Gentry used to declare. A real-estate and money-loaning firm brought three more young men to our town, while half a dozen families moved out to Kansas from Indiana and made a "Hoosiers' Nest" in our midst. And then Fingal's Creek and Red Range and all the fertile Neosho lands were being taken by settlers. The country population augmented that of the town, nor was the social plane of Springvale lowered by these farmers' sons and daughters, who also were of the salt of the earth.

"For an engaged girl, Marjory Whately's about the most popular I ever see," Dollie Gentry said to Cam one evening, when the Cambridge House was all aglow with light and full of gay company.

Marjie, in a dainty white wool gown with a pink sash about her waist, and pink ribbons in her hair, had just gone from the kitchen with three or four admiring young fellows dancing attendance upon her.

"How can anybody help lovin' her?" Dollie went on.

Cam sighed, "O Lordy! A girl like her to marry that there pole cat! How can the Good Bein' permit it?"

"'Tain't between her and her Maker; it's all between Mrs. Whately and Amos," Dollie asserted. "Now, Cam, has anybody ever heard her say she was engaged? She goes with one and another. Cris Mead's wife says she always has more company'n she can make use of any ways. It's like too much canned fruit a'most. Mis' Mead loves Marjie, and she's so proud of her. Marjie don't wear no ring, neither, not a one, sence she took off Phil Baronet's."

Springvale had sharp eyes; and the best-hearted among us could tell just how many rings any girl did or didn't wear.

"Well, by hen!" Cam declared, "I'm just goin' to ask herself myself."

"No, you ain't, Cam Gentry," Dollie said decisively.

"Now, Dollie, don't you dictate to your lord and master no more. I won't stand it." Cam squinted up at her from his chair in a ludicrous attempt to frown. "Worst hen-pecked man in town, by golly."

"I ain't goin' to dictate to no fool, Cam. If you want to be one, I can't help it. I must go and set bread now." And Dollie pattered off singing "Come Thou Fount," in a soft little old-fashioned tune.

* * * * *

"Marjie, girl, I knowed you when you was in bib aperns, and I knowed your father long ago. Best man ever went out to fight and never got back. They's as good a one comin' back, though, some day," he added softly, and smiled as the pink bloom on Marjie's cheeks deepened. "Marjie, don't git mad at an old man like your Uncle Cam. I mean no harm."

It was the morning after the party. Marjie, who had been helping Mary Gentry "straighten up," was resting now by the cosy fireplace, while Dollie and Mary prepared lunch.

"Go ahead, Uncle Cam," the girl said, smiling. "I couldn't get mad at you, because you never would do anything unkind."

"Well, little sweetheart, honest now, and I won't tell, and it's none of my doggoned business neither; but be you goin' to marry Amos Judson?"

There was no resentment in the girl's face when she heard his halting question, but the pink color left it, and her white cheeks and big brown eyes gave her a stateliness Cam had never seen in her before.

"No, Uncle Cam. It makes no difference what comes to me, I could not marry such a man. I never will."

"Oh, Lord bless you, Marjie!" Cam closed his eyes a moment. "They's a long happy road ahead of you. I can see it with my good inside eyes that sees further'n these things I use to run the Cambridge House with. 'Tain't my business, I'm a gossipin' inquisitive old pokeyer-nose, but I've always been so proud of you, little blossom. Yes, we're comin', Dollie, if you've got a thing a dyspeptic can eat."

He held the door for Marjie to pass before him to the dining-room. Cam was not one of the too-familiar men. There was a gentleman's heart under the old spotted velvet "weskit," as he called his vest, and with all his bad grammar, a quaint dignity and purity of manner and speech to women.

But for all this declaration of Marjie's, Judson was planning each day for the great event with an assurance that was remarkable.

"She'll be so tangled up in this, she'll have to come to terms. There ain't no way out, if she wants to save old Whately's name from dishonor and keep herself out of the hired-girl class," he said to Tell Mapleson. "And besides, there's the durned Baronet tribe that all the Whatelys have been so devoted to. That's it, just devoted to 'em. Now they'll come in for a full share of disgrace, too."

The little man had made a god of money so long he could not understand how poverty and freedom may bring infinitely more of blessing than wealth and bonds. So many years, too, he had won his way by trickery and deception, he felt himself a man of Destiny in all he under-took. But one thing he never could know—I wonder if men ever do know—a woman's heart. He had not counted on having to reckon with Marjie, having made sure of her mother. It was not in his character to understand an abiding love.

There was another type of woman whom he misjudged—that of Lettie Conlow. In his dictatorial little spirit, he did not give a second thought beyond the use he could make of her in his greedy swooping in of money.

"O'mie knows too much," Judson informed his friend. "He's better out of this town. And Lettie, now, I can just do anything with Lettie. You know, Mapleson, a widower's really more attractive to a girl than a young man; and as for me, well, it's just in me, that's all. Lettie likes me."

Whatever Tell thought, he counselled care.

"You can't be too careful, Judson. Girls are the unsafest cattle on this green earth. My boy fancied Conlow's girl once. I sent him away. He's married now, and doing well. Runs on a steamboat from St. Louis to New Orleans. I'd go a little slow about gettin' a girl like Lettie in here."

"Oh, I can manage any girl on earth. Old maids and young things'll come flockin' round a man with money. Beats all."

This much O'mie had overheard as the two talked together in tones none too low, in Judson's little cage of an office, forgetting the clerk arranging the goods for the night.



When Judson had found out how Mrs. Whately had tried to help his cause by appealing to my father, his anger was a fury. Poor Mrs. Whately, who had meant only for the best, beset with the terror of disgrace to Marjie through the dishonorable acts of her father, tried helplessly to pacify him. Between her daughter and herself a great gulf opened whenever Judson's name was mentioned; but in everything else the bond between them was stronger than ever.

"She is such a loving, kind daughter, Amos," Mrs. Whately said to the anxious suitor. "She fills the house with sunshine, and she is so strong and self-reliant. When I spoke to her about our coming poverty, she only laughed and held up her little hands, and said, 'They 're equal to it.' The very day I spoke to her she began to do something. She found three music pupils right away. She's been giving lessons all this Fall, and has all she can give the time to. And when I hinted about her father's name being disgraced, she kissed his picture and put it on the Bible and said, 'He was true as truth. I won't disgrace myself by ever thinking anything else.' And last of all, because she did so love Phil once" (poor Mrs. Whately was the worst of strategists here), "when I tried to put his case she said indifferently, 'If he did wrong, let him right it. But he didn't.' Now, Amos, you must talk to her yourself. I don't know what John Baronet advised her to do."