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THE PRICE OF THE PRAIRIE
"AT EVENING TIME IT SHALL BE LIGHT"
[Illustration: "Come, Phil," she cried, "come, crown me Queen of May
here in April!"]
THE PRICE OF THE PRAIRIE
A Story Of Kansas
by
MARGARET HILL McCARTER
Author of "The Cottonwood's Story," "Cuddy's Baby," Etc.
With Five Illustrations in Color by J. N. Marchand
Fifteenth Edition
[Illustration]
Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1910
Published October 8, 1910
Second Edition, October 29, 1910
Third Edition, November 16, 1910
Fourth Edition, December 3, 1910
Fifth Edition, December 10, 1910
Sixth Edition, December 17, 1910
Seventh Edition, January 25, 1911
Eighth Edition, February 25, 1911
Ninth Edition, April 5, 1911
Tenth Edition, May 3, 1911
Eleventh Edition, September 23, 1911
Twelfth Edition, December 9, 1911
Thirteenth Edition, February 17, 1912
Fourteenth Edition, August 10, 1912
Fifteenth Edition, December 28, 1912
Copyrighted in Great Britain
Press of the Vail Company
Coshocton, U. S. A.
This little love story of the prairies is dedicated to all who believe
that the defence of the helpless is heroism; that the protection of the
home is splendid achievement; and, that the storm, and stress, and
patient endurance of the day will bring us at last to the peace of the
purple twilight.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
PROEM ix
I Springvale by the Neosho 13
II Jean Pahusca 25
III The Hermit's Cave 32
IV In the Prairie Twilight 43
V A Good Indian 56
VI When the Heart Beats Young 73
VII The Foreshadowing of Peril 85
VIII The Cost of Safety 99
IX The Search for the Missing 114
X O'Mie's Choice 132
XI Golden Days 150
XII A Man's Estate 166
XIII The Topeka Rally 184
XIV Deepening Gloom 200
XV Rockport and "Rockport" 217
XVI Beginning Again 242
XVII In the Valley of the Arickaree 261
XVIII The Sunlight on Old Glory 277
XIX A Man's Business 292
XX The Cleft in the Rock 317
XXI The Call to Service 334
XXII The Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry 354
XXIII In Jean's Land 370
XXIV The Cry of Womanhood 390
XXV Judson Summoned 403
XXVI O'Mie's Inheritance 420
XXVII Sunset by the Sweetwater 442
XXVIII The Heritage 464
ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
"Come, Phil," she cried, "come, crown me Queen
of May here in April!" _Frontispiece_
"Baronet, I think we are marching straight 158
into Hell's jaws"
Every movement of ours had been watched by 244
Indian scouts
Like the passing of a hurricane, horses, mules, 288
men, all dashed toward the place
They came slowly toward us, the two captive 394
women for whom we waited
PROEM
"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her"
I can hear it always--the Call of the Prairie. The passing of sixty
Winters has left me a vigorous man, although my hair is as white as the
January snowdrift in the draws, and the strenuous events of some of the
years have put a tax on my strength. I shall always limp a little in my
right foot--that was left out on the plains one freezing night with
nothing under it but the earth, and nothing over it but the sky. Still,
considering that although the sixty years were spent mainly in that
pioneer time when every day in Kansas was its busy day, I am not even
beginning to feel old. Neither am I sentimental and inclined to poetry.
Life has given me mostly her prose selections for my study.
But this love of the Prairie is a part of my being. All the comedy and
tragedy of these sixty years have had them for a setting, and I can no
more put them out of my life than the Scotchman can forget the heather,
or the Swiss emigrant in the flat green lowland can forget the icy
passes of the glacier-polished Alps. Geography is an element of every
man's life. The prairies are in the red corpuscles of my blood. Up and
down their rippling billows my memory runs. For always I see
them,--green and blossom-starred in the Springtime; or drenched with the
driving summer deluge that made each draw a brimming torrent; or golden,
purple, and silver-rimmed in the glorious Autumn. I have seen them gray
in the twilight, still and tenderly verdant at noonday, and cold and
frost-wreathed under the white star-beams. I have seen them yield up
their rich yellow sheaves of grain, and I have looked upon their dreary
wastes marked with the dull black of cold human blood. Plain practical
man of affairs that I am, I come back to the blessed prairies for my
inspiration as the tartan warmed up the heart of Argyle.
THE PRICE OF THE PRAIRIE
CHAPTER I
SPRINGVALE BY THE NEOSHO
Sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer rains;
Nearer my heart than the mighty hills are the wind-swept Kansas plains.
Dearer the sight of a shy wild rose by the road-side's dusty way,
Than all the splendor of poppy-fields ablaze in the sun of May.
Gay as the bold poinsettia is, and the burden of pepper trees,
The sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer to me than these;
And rising ever above the song of the hoarse, insistent sea,
The voice of the prairie calling, calling me.
--ESTHER M. CLARKE.
Whenever I think of these broad Kansas plains I think also of Marjie. I
cannot now remember the time when I did not care for her, but the day
when O'mie first found it out is as clear to me as yesterday, although
that was more than forty years ago. O'mie was the reddest-haired,
best-hearted boy that ever laughed in the face of Fortune and made
friends with Fate against the hardest odds. His real name was O'Meara,
Thomas O'Meara, but we forgot that years ago.
"If O'mie were set down in the middle of the Sahara Desert," my Aunt
Candace used to say, "there'd be an oasis a mile across by the next day
noon, with never failing water and green trees right in the middle of
it, and O'mie sitting under them drinking the water like it was Irish
rum."
O'mie would always grin at this saying and reply that, "by the nixt day
noon follerin' that, the rascally gover'mint at Washin'ton would come
along an' kick him out into the rid san', claimin' that that particular
oasis was an Injun riservation, specially craayted by Providence fur the
dirthy Osages,--the bastes!"
O'mie hated the Indians, but he was a friend to all the rest of mankind.
Indeed if it had not been for him I should not have had that limp in my
right foot, for both of my feet would have been mouldering these many
years under the curly mesquite of the Southwest plains. But that comes
later.
We were all out on the prairie hunting for our cows that evening--the
one when O'mie guessed my secret. Marjie's pony was heading straight to
the west, flying over the ground. The big red sun was slipping down a
flame-wreathed sky, touching with fire the ragged pennons of a
blue-black storm cloud hanging sullenly to the northward, and making an
indescribable splendor in the far southwest.
Riding hard after Marjie, coming at an angle from the bluff above the
draw, was an Osage Indian, huge as a giant, and frenzied with whiskey. I
must have turned a white despairing face toward my comrades, and I was
glad afterward that I was against the background of that flaming sunset
so that my features were in the shadow. It was then that O'mie, who was
nearest me, looking steadily in my eyes said in a low voice:
"Bedad, Phil! so that's how it is wid ye, is it? Then we've got to kill
that Injun jist fur grandeur."
I knew O'mie for many years, and I never saw him show a quiver of fear,
not even in those long weary days when, white and hollow-cheeked, he
waited for his last enemy, Death,--whom he vanquished, looking up into
my face with eyes of inexpressible peace, and murmuring softly,
"Safe in the arms of Jasus."
Old men are prone to ramble in their stories, and I am not old. To prove
that, I must not jiggle with these heads and tails of Time, but I must
begin earlier and follow down these eventful years as if I were a real
novel-writer with consecutive chapters to set down.
Springvale by the Neosho was a favorite point for early settlers. It
nestled under the sheltered bluff on the west. There were never-failing
springs in the rocky outcrop. A magnificent grove of huge oak trees,
most rare in the plains country, lined the river's banks and covered the
fertile lowlands. It made a landmark of the spot, this beautiful natural
forest, and gave it a place on the map as a meeting-ground for the wild
tribes long before the days of civilized occupation. The height above
the valley commands all that wide prairie that ripples in treeless
fertility from as far as even an Indian can see until it breaks off with
that cliff that walls the Neosho bottom lands up and down for many a
mile. To the southwest the open black lowlands along Fingal's Creek
beckoned as temptingly to the settler as did the Neosho Valley itself.
The divide between the two, the river and its tributary, coming down
from the northwest makes a high promontory. Its eastern side is the
rocky ledge of the bluff. On the west it slopes off to the fertile draws
of Fingal's Creek, and the sunset prairies that swell up and away
beyond them.
Just where the little stream joins the bigger one Springvale took root
and flourished amazingly. It was an Indian village site and
trading-point since tradition can remember. The old tepee rings show
still up in the prairie cornfield where even the plough, that great
weapon of civilization and obliteration, has not quite made a dead level
of the landmarks of the past. I've bumped across those rings many a time
in the days when we went from Springvale up to the Red Range schoolhouse
in the broken country where Fingal's Creek has its source. It was the
hollow beyond the tepee ring that caused his pony to stumble that night
when Jean Pahusca, the big Osage, was riding like fury between me and
that blood-red sky.
The early Indians always built on the uplands although the valleys ran
close beneath them. They had only arrows and speed to protect them from
their foes. It was not until they had the white man's firearms that they
dared to make their homes in the lowlands. Black Kettle in the sheltered
Washita Valley might never have fallen before General Custer had the
Cheyennes kept to the high places after the custom of their fathers. But
the early white settlers had firearms and skill in building
block-houses, so they took to the valleys near wood and water.
On the day that Kansas became a Territory, my father, John Baronet, with
all his household effects started from Rockport, Massachusetts, to begin
life anew in the wild unknown West. He was not a poor man, heaven bless
his memory! He never knew want except the pinch of pioneer life when
money is of no avail because the necessities are out of reach. In the
East he had been a successful lawyer and his success followed him. They
will tell you in Springvale to-day that "if Judge Baronet were alive and
on the bench things would go vastly better," and much more to like
effect.
My mother was young and beautiful, and to her the world was full of
beauty. Especially did she love the sea. All her life was spent beside
it, and it was ever her delight. It must have been from her that my own
love of nature came as a heritage to me, giving me capacity to take and
keep those prairie scenes of idyllic beauty that fill my memory now.
In the Summer of 1853 my father's maiden sister Candace had come to live
with us. Candace Baronet was the living refutation of all the unkind
criticism ever heaped upon old maids. She was a strong, comely,
unselfish woman who lived where the best thoughts grow.
One day in late October, a sudden squall drove landward, capsizing the
dory in which my mother was returning from a visit to old friends on an
island off the Rockport coast. She was in sight of home when that
furious gust of wind and rain swept across her path. The next morning
the little waves rippled musically against the beach whither they had
borne my dead mother and left her without one mark of cruel usage.
Neither was there any sign of terror on her face, white and peaceful
under her damp dark hair.
I know now that my father and his sister tried hard to suppress their
sorrow for my sake, but the curtains on the seaward side of the house
were always lowered now and my father's face looked more and more to the
westward. The sea became an unbearable thing to him. Yet he was a brave,
unselfish man and in all the years following that one Winter he lived
cheerfully and nobly--a sunshiny life.
In the early Spring he gave up his law practice in Rockport.
"The place for me is on the frontier," he said to my Aunt Candace one
day. "I'm sick of the sight of that water. I want to try the prairies
and I want to be in the struggle that is beginning beyond the Missouri.
I want to do one man's part in the making of the West."
Aunt Candace looked steadily into her brother's face.
"I am sick of the sea, too, John," she said. "Will the prairies be
kinder to us, I wonder."
I did not know till long afterward, when the Kansas blue-grass had
covered both their graves, that the blue Atlantic had in its keeping the
form of the one love of my aunt's life. Rich am I, Philip Baronet, to
have had such a father and such a mother-hearted aunt. They made life
full and happy for me with never from that day any doleful grieving over
the portion Providence had given them. And the blessed prairie did bring
them peace. Its spell was like a benediction on their lives who lived to
bless many lives.
It was late June when our covered wagon and tired ox-team stopped on the
east bluff above the Neosho just outside of Springvale. The sun was
dropping behind the prairie far across the river valley when another
wagon and ox-team with pioneers like ourselves joined us. They were
Irving Whately and his wife and little daughter, Marjory. I was only
seven and I have forgotten many things of these later years, but I'll
never forget Marjie as I first saw her. She was stiff from long sitting
in the big covered wagon, and she stretched her pudgy little legs to get
the cramp out of them, as she took in the scene. Her pink sun-bonnet had
fallen back and she was holding it by both strings in one hand. Her
rough brown hair was all in little blowsy ringlets round her face and
the two braids hanging in front of her shoulders ended each in a big
blowsy curl. Her eyes were as brown as her hair. But what I noted then
and many a time afterward was the exceeding whiteness of her face. From
St. Louis I had seen nothing but dark-skinned Mexicans, tanned
Missourians, and Indian, Creole, and French Canadian, all coppery or
bronze brown, in this land of glaring sunshine. Marjie made me think of
Rockport and the pink-cheeked children of the country lanes about the
town. But most of all she called my mother back, white and beautiful as
she looked in her last peaceful sleep, the day the sea gave her to us
again. "Star Face," Jean Pahusca used to call Marjie, for even in the
Kansas heat and browning winds she never lost the pink tint no miniature
painting on ivory could exaggerate.
We stood looking at one another in the purple twilight.
"What's your name?"
"Marjory Whately. What's yours?"
"Phil Baronet, and I'm seven years old." This, a shade boastingly.
"I'm six," Marjory said. "Are you afraid of Indians?"
"No," I declared. "I won't let the Indians hurt you. Let's run a race,"
pointing toward where the Neosho lay glistening in the last light of
day, a gap in the bluff letting the reflection from great golden clouds
illumine its wave-crumpled surface.
We took hold of hands and started down the long slope together, but our
parents called us back. "Playmates already," I heard them saying.
In the gathering evening shadows we all lumbered down the slope to the
rock-bottomed ford and up into the little hamlet of Springvale.
That night when I said my prayers to Aunt Candace I cried softly on her
shoulder. "Marjie makes me homesick," I sobbed, and Aunt Candace
understood then and always afterward.
The very air about Springvale was full of tradition. The town had been
from the earliest times a landmark of the old Santa Fe trail. When the
freighters and plainsmen left the village and climbed to the top of the
slope and set their faces to the west there lay before them only the
wilderness wastes. Here Nature, grown miserly, offered not even a stick
of timber to mend a broken cart-pole in all the thousand miles between
the Neosho and the Spanish settlement of New Mexico.
Here the Indians came with their furs and beaded garments to exchange
for firearms and fire-water. People fastened their doors at night for a
purpose. No curfew bell was needed to call in the children. The wooded
Neosho Valley grew dark before the evening lights had left the prairies
beyond the west bluff, and the waters that sang all day a song of cheer
as they rippled over the rocky river bed seemed always after nightfall
to gurgle murderously as they went their way down the black-shadowed
valley.
The main street was as broad as an Eastern boulevard. Space counted for
nothing in planning towns in a land made up of distances. At the end of
this street stood the "Last Chance" general store, the outpost of
civilization. What the freighter failed to get here he would do without
until he stood inside the brown adobe walls of the old city of Santa Fe.
Tell Mapleson, the proprietor of the "Last Chance," was a tall, slight,
restless man, quick-witted, with somewhat polished manners and a gift
of persuasion in his speech.
Near this store was Conlow's blacksmith shop, where the low-browed,
black-eyed Conlow family have shod horses and mended wagons since
anybody can remember. They were the kind of people one instinctively
does not trust, and yet nobody could find a true bill against them. The
shop had thick stone walls. High up under the eaves on the north side a
long narrow slit, where a stone was missing, let out a bar of sullen red
light. Old Conlow did not know about that chink for years, for it was
only from the bluff above the town that the light could be seen.
Our advent in Springvale was just at the time of its transition from a
plains trading-post to a Territorial town with ambition for settlement
and civilization. I can see now that John Baronet deserved the place he
came to hold in that frontier community, for he was a State-builder.
"I should feel more dacent fur all etarnity jist to be buried in the
same cimet'ry wid Judge Bar'net," O'mie once declared. "I should walk
into kingdom-come, dignified and head up, saying to the kaper av the
pearly gates, kind o' careless-like, 'I'm from that little Kansas town
av Springvale an' ye'll check up my mortial remains over in the
cimet'ry, be my neighbor, Judge Bar'net, if ye plaze.'"
It was O'mie's way of saying what most persons of the community felt
toward my father from the time he drove into Springvale in the purple
twilight of that June evening in 1854.
Irving Whately's stock of merchandise was installed in the big stone
building on the main corner of the village, where the straggling Indian
trails from the south and the trail from the new settlement out on
Fingal's Creek converged on the broad Santa Fe trail. Amos Judson, a
young settler, became his clerk and general helper. In the front room
over this store was John Baronet's law office, and his sign swinging
above Whately's seemed always to link those two names together.
Opposite this building was the village tavern. It was a wide two-story
structure, also of stone, set well back from the street, with a double
veranda along the front and the north side. A huge oak tree grew before
it, and a flagstone walk led up to the veranda steps. In big black
lettering its inscription over the door told the wayfarer on the old
trail that this was
THE CAMBRIDGE HOUSE.
C. C. GENTRY, PROP.
Cam Gentry (his real name was Cambridge, christened from the little
Indiana town of Cambridge City) was a good-souled, easy-going man,
handicapped for life by a shortness of vision no spectacle lens could
overcome. It might have been disfiguring to any other man, but Cam's
clear eye at close range, and his comical squint and tilt of the head to
study out what lay farther away, were good-natured and unique. He was in
Kansas for the fun of it, while his wife, Dollie, kept tavern from pure
love of cooking more good things to eat than opportunity afforded in a
home. She was a Martha whose kitchen was "dukedom large enough."
Whatever motive, fine or coarse, whatever love of spoils or love of
liberty, brought other men hither, Cam had come to see the joke--and he
saw it. While as to Dollie, "Lord knows," she used to say, "there's
plenty of good cooks in old Wayne County, Indiany; but if they can get
anything to eat out here they need somebody to cook it for 'em, and cook
it right."
Doing chores about the tavern for his board and keep was the little
orphan boy, Thomas O'Meara, whose story I did not know for many years.
We called him O'mie. That was all. Marjie and O'mie and Mary Gentry, Cam
and Dollie's only child, were my first Kansas playmates. Together we
waded barefoot in the shallow ripples of the Neosho, and little by
little we began to explore that wide, sweet prairie land to the west.
There was just one tree standing up against the horizon; far away to us
it seemed, a huge cottonwood, that kept sentinel guard over the plains
from the highest level of the divide.
Whately built a home a block or more beyond that of his young clerk,
Amos Judson. It was farther up the slope than any other house in
Springvale except my father's. That was on the very crest of the west
bluff, overlooking the Neosho Valley. It fronted the east, and across
the wide street before it the bluff broke precipitously four hundred
feet to the level floor of the valley below. Sometimes the shelving
rocks furnished a footing where one could clamber down half way and walk
along the narrow ledge. Here were cunning hiding-places, deep crevices,
and vine-covered heaps of jagged stone outcrop invisible from the height
above or the valley below. It was a bit of rugged, untamable cliff
rarely found in the plains country; and it broke so suddenly from the
level promontory sloping down to the south and away to the west, that a
stranger sitting by our east windows would never have guessed that the
seeming bushes peering up across the street were really the tops of tall
trees with their roots in the side of the bluff not half way to the
bottom.
From our west window the green glory of the plains spread out to the
baths of sunset. No wonder this Kansas land is life of my life. The sea
is to me a wavering treachery, but these firm prairies are the joy of my
memory.
Our house was of stone with every corner rounded like a turret wall. It
was securely built against the winter winds that swept that bluff when
the Kansas blizzard unchained its fury, for it stood where it caught the
full wrath of the elements. It caught, too, the splendor of all the
sunrise beyond the mist-filled valley, and the full moon in the level
east above the oak treetops made a dream of chastened glory like the
silver twilight gleams in Paradise.
"I want to watch the world coming and going," my father said when his
house was finished; "and it is coming down that Santa Fe trail. It is
State-making that is begun here. The East doesn't understand it yet,
outside of New England. And these Missourians, Lord pity them! they
think they can kill human freedom with a bullet, like thrusting daggers
into the body of Julius Caesar to destroy the Roman Empire. What do they
know of the old Puritan blood, and the strength of the grip of a
Massachusetts man? Heaven knows where they came from, these Missouri
ruffians; but," he added, "the devil has it arranged where they will go
to."
"Oh, John, be careful," exclaimed Aunt Candace.
"Are you afraid of them, Candace?"
"Well, no, I don't believe I am," replied my aunt.
She was not one of those blustering north-northwest women. She squared
her life by the admonition of Isaiah, "In quietness and in confidence
shall be your strength." But she was a Baronet, and although they have
their short-comings, fear seems to have been left out of their make-up.
CHAPTER II
JEAN PAHUSCA
In even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings
For the good they comprehend not.
--LONGFELLOW.
The frontier broke all lines of caste. There was no aristocrat,
autocrat, nor plutocrat in Springvale; but the purest democracy was
among the children. Life was before us; we loved companionship, and the
same dangers threatened us all. The first time I saw Marjie she asked,
"Are you afraid of Indians?" They were the terror of her life. Even
to-day the mere press despatch of an Indian uprising in Oklahoma or
Arizona will set the blood bounding through my veins and my first
thought is of her.
I shall never forget the day my self-appointed guardianship of her
began. Before we had a schoolhouse, Aunt Candace taught the children of
the community in our big living-room. One rainy afternoon, late in the
Fall, the darkness seemed to drop down suddenly. We could not see to
study, and we were playing boisterously about the benches of our
improvised schoolroom, Marjie, Mary Gentry, Lettie and Jim Conlow, Tell
Mapleson,--old Tell's boy,--O'mie, both the Mead boys, and the four
Anderson children. Suddenly Marjie, who was watching the rain beating
against the west window, called, "Phil, come here! What is that long,
narrow, red light down by the creek?"
Marjie had the softest voice. Amid the harsh jangle of the Andersons and
Bill Mead's big whooping shouts it always seemed like music to me. I
stared hard at the sullen block of flame in the evening shadows.
"I don't know what it is," I said.
She slipped her fingers into the pocket of my coat as I turned away, and
her eyes looked anxiously into mine. "Could it be an Indian camp-fire?"
she queried.
I looked again, flattening my nose against the window pane. "I don't
know, Marjie, but I'll find out. Maybe it's somebody's kitchen fire down
west. I'll ask O'mie."
In truth, that light had often troubled me. It did not look like the
twinkling candle-flare I could see in so many windows of the village. I
turned to O'mie, who, with his face to the wall, waited in a game of
hide-and-seek. Before I could call him Marjie gave a low cry of terror.
We all turned to her in an instant, and I saw outside a dark face close
against the window. It was gone so quickly that only O'mie and I caught
sight of it.
"What was it, Marjie?" the children cried.
"An Indian boy," gasped Marjie. "He was right against the window."
"I'll bet it was a spook," shouted Bill Mead.
"I'll bet it wasn't nothin' at all," grinned Jim Conlow. "Possum Conlow"
we called him for that secretive grin on his shallow face.
"I'll bet it wath a whole gang of Thiennes," lisped tow-headed Bud
Anderson.
"They ain't no Injuns nearer than the reserve down the river, and ain't
been no Injuns in Springvale for a long time, 'cept annuity days,"
declared Tell Mapleson.
"Well, let's foind out," shouted O'mie, "I ain't afraid av no Injun."
"Neither am I," I cried, starting after O'mie, who was out of the door
at the word.
But Marjie caught my arm, and held it.
"Let O'mie go. Don't go, Phil, please don't."
I can see her yet, her brown eyes full of pleading, her soft brown hair
in rippling waves about her white temples. Did my love for her spring
into being at that instant? I cannot tell. But I do know that it was a
crucial moment for me. Sixty years have I seen, and my life has grown
practical and barren of sentiment. But I know that the boy, Phil
Baronet, who stood that evening with Marjie and the firelight and safety
on one side, and darkness and uncertainty on the other, had come to one
of those turning-points in a life, unrecognized for the time, whose
decision controls all the years that follow. For suddenly came the query
"How can I best take care of her? Shall I stay with her in the light, or
go into the dark and strike the danger out of it?" I didn't frame all
this into words. It was all only an intense feeling, but the mental
judgment was very real. I turned from her and cleared the doorstep at a
leap, and in a moment was by O'mie's side, chasing down the hill-slope
toward town.
We never thought to run to the bluff's edge and clamber down the
shelving, precipitous sides. Here was the only natural hiding-place, but
like children we all ran the other way. When we had come in again with
the report of "No enemy in sight," and had shut the door against the
rain, I happened to glance out of the east window. Climbing up to the
street from the cliff I saw the lithe form of a young Indian. He came
straight to the house and stood by the east window where he could see
inside. Then with quick, springing step he walked down the slope. I
crossed to the west window and watched him shutting out that red bar of
light now and then, till he melted into the shadows.
Meanwhile the children were chattering like sparrows and had not noticed
me.
"Would you know it, Marjie, if you thaw it again?" lisped Bud Anderson.
"Oh, yes! His hair was straight across like this." Marjie drew one hand
across her curl-shaded forehead, to show how square the black hair grew
about the face she had seen.
"That's nothin'," said Bill Mead. "They change scalps every time they
catch a white man,--just take their own off an' put his on, an' it
grows. There's lots of men in Kansas look like white men's just Injuns
growed a white scalp on 'em."
"Really, is there?" asked Mary Gentry credulously.
"Sure, I've seen 'em," went on Bill with a boy's love of that kind of
lying.
"Wouldn't a Injun look funny with my thcalp?" Bud Anderson put in. "I'll
bet I'm jutht a Injun mythelf."
"Then you've got some little baby girl's scalp," grinned Jim Conlow.
"'Tain't no 'pothum'th, anyhow," rejoined Bud; and we laughed our fears
away.
That evening Aunt Candace sent me home with Marjie to take some fresh
doughnuts to Mrs. Whately. I can see the little girl now as we splashed
sturdily down Cliff Street through the wet gloom, her face like a white
blossom in the shadowy twilight, her crimson jacket open at the throat,
and the soft little worsted scarf about her damp fluffy curls making a
glow of rich coloring in the dim light.
"You'll never let the Indians get you, will you, Phil?" she asked, when
we stood a moment by the bushes just at the steepest bend of the street.
I stood up proudly. I was growing very fast in this gracious climate.
"The finest-built boy in Springvale," the men called me. "No, Marjie.
The Indians won't get me, nor anybody else I don't want them to have."
She drew close to me, and I caught her hand in mine a moment. Then,
boylike, I flipped her heavy braid of hair over her shoulder and shook
the wettest bushes till their drops scattered in a shower about her.
Something, a dog we thought, suddenly slid out from the bush and down
the cliff-side. When I started home after delivering the cakes, Marjie
held the candle at the door to light my way. As I turned at the edge of
the candle's rays to wave my hand, I saw her framed in the doorway.
Would that some artist could paint that picture for me now!
"I'll whistle up by the bushes," I cried, and strode into the dark.
On the bend of the crest, where the street drops down almost too steep
for a team of horses to climb, I turned and saw Marjie's light in the
window, and the shadow of her head on the pane. I gave a long, low
whistle, the signal call we had for our own. It was not an echo, it was
too near and clear, the very same low call in the bushes just over the
cliff beside me as though some imitator were trying to catch the notes.
A few feet farther on my path I came face to face with the same Indian
whom I had seen an hour before. He strode by me in silence.
Without once looking back I said to myself, "If you aren't afraid of me,
I'm not afraid of you. But who gave that whistle, I wonder. That's my
call to Marjie."
"Marjie's awful 'fraid of Injuns," I said to Aunt Candace that night.
"Didn't want me to find who it was peeked, but I went after him, clear
down to Amos Judson's house, because I thought that was the best way, if
it was an Injun. She isn't afraid of anything else. She's the only girl
that can ride Tell Mapleson's pony, and only O'mie and Tell and I among
the boys can ride him. And she killed the big rattlesnake that nearly
had Jim Conlow, killed it with a hoe. And she can climb where no other
girl dares to, on the bluff below town toward the Hermit's Cave. But
she's just as 'fraid of an Injun! I went to hunt him, though."
"And you did just right, Phil. The only way to be safe is to go after
what makes you afraid. I guess, though, there really was nobody. It was
just Marjie's imagination, wasn't it?"
"Yes, there was, Auntie; I saw him climb up from the cliff over there
and go off down the hill after we came in."
"Why didn't you say so?" asked my aunt.
"We couldn't get him, and it would have scared Marjie," I answered.
"That's right, Phil. You are a regular Kansas boy, you are. The best of
them may claim to come from Massachusetts,"--with a touch of
pride,--"but no matter where they come from, they must learn how to be
quick-witted and brave and manly here in Kansas. It's what all boys need
to be here."
A few days later the door of our schoolroom opened and an Indian boy
strode in and seated himself on the bench beside Tell Mapleson. He was a
lad of fifteen, possibly older. His dress was of the Osage fashion and
round his neck he wore a string of elk teeth. His face was thoroughly
Indian, yet upon his features something else was written. His long black
hair was a shade too jetty and soft for an Indian's, and it grew
squarely across his forehead, suggesting the face of a French priest.
We children sat open-mouthed. Even Aunt Candace forgot herself a
moment. Bud Anderson first found his voice.
"Well, I'll thwan!" he exclaimed in sheer amazement.
Bill Mead giggled and that broke the spell.
"How do you do?" said my aunt kindly.
"How," replied the young brave.
"What is your name, and what do you want?" asked our teacher.
"Jean Pahusca. Want school. Want book--" He broke off and finished in a
jargon of French and Indian.
"Where is your home, your tepee?" queried Aunt Candace.
The Indian only shook his head. Then taking from his beads a heavy
silver cross, crudely shaped and wrought, he rose and placed it on the
table. Taking up a book at the same time he seated himself to study like
the rest of us.
"He has paid his tuition," said my aunt, smiling. "We'll let him stay."
So Jean Pahusca was established in our school.
CHAPTER III
THE HERMIT'S CAVE
The secret which the mountains kept
The river never told.
The bluff was our continual delight. It was so difficult, so full of
surprises, so enchanting in its dangers. All manner of creeping things
in general, and centipedes and rattlesnakes in particular, made their
homes in its crevices. Its footing was perilous to the climber, and its
hiding-places had held outlaws and worse. Then it had its haunted spots,
where tradition told of cruel tragedies in days long gone by; and of the
unknown who had found here secret retreat, who came and went, leaving
never a name to tell whom they were nor what their story might be. All
these the old cliff had in its keeping for the sturdy boys and girls of
parents who had come here to conquer the West.
Just below the town where the Neosho swings away to the right, the
bottom lands narrow down until the stream sweeps deep and swift against
a stone wall almost two hundred feet in height. From the top of the
cliff here the wall drops down nearly another hundred feet, leaving an
inaccessible heap of rough cavernous rocks in the middle stratum.
Had the river been less deep and dangerous we could not have gotten up
from below; while to come down from above might mean a fall of three
hundred feet or more to the foam-torn waters and the jagged rocks
beneath them. Here a stranger hermit had hidden himself years before.
Nobody knew his story, nor how he had found his way hither, for he spoke
in a strange tongue that nobody could interpret. That this inaccessible
place was his home was certain. Boys bathing in the shallows up-stream
sometimes caught a glimpse of him moving about among the bushes. And
sometimes at night from far to the east a light could be seen twinkling
half way up the dark cliff-side. Every boy in Springvale had an ambition
to climb to the Hermit's Cave and explore its mysteries; for the old man
died as he had lived, unknown. One winter day his body was found on the
sand bar below the rapids where the waters had carried him after his
fall from the point of rock above the deep pool. There was no mark on
his coarse clothing to tell a word of his story, and the Neosho kept his
secret always.
What boy after that would not have braved any danger to explore the
depths of this hiding-place? But we could not do it. Try as we might,
the hidden path leading up, or down, baffled us.
After Jean Pahusca came into our school we had a new interest and for a
time we forgot that tantalizing river wall below town. Jean was
irregular in his attendance and his temper. He learned quickly, for an
Indian. Sometimes he was morose and silent; sometimes he was affable and
kind, chatting among us like one of our own; and sometimes he found the
white man's fire-water. Then he murdered as he went. He was possessed of
a demon to kill, kill the moment he became drunk. Every living thing in
his way had to flee or perish then. He would stop in his mad chase to
crush the life out of a sleeping cat, or to strike at a bird or a
chicken. Whiskey to him meant death, as we learned to our sorrow.
Nobody knew where he lived. He dressed like an Osage but he was
supposed to make his home with the Kaws, whose reservation was much
nearer to us. Sometimes in the cool weather he slept in our sheds. In
warm weather he lay down on the ground wherever he chose to sleep. There
was a fascination about him unlike all the other Indians who came up to
the village, many of whom we knew. He could be so gentle and winning in
his manner at times, one forgot he was an Indian. But the spirit of the
Red Man was ever present to overcome the strange European mood in a
moment.
"He's no Osage, that critter ain't," Cam Gentry said to a group on his
tavern veranda one annuity day when the tribes had come to town for
their quarterly allowances. "He's second cousin on his father's side to
some French missionary, you bet your life. He's got a gait like a Jessut
priest. An' he's not Osage on't other side, neither. I'll bet his mother
was a Kiowa, an' that means his maternal grandad was a rattlesnake, even
if his paternal grandpop was a French markis turned religious an' gone
a-missionaryin' among the red heathen. You dig fur enough into that
buck's hide an' you'll find cussedness big as a sheep, I'm tellin' you."
"Where does he live?" inquired my father.
"Lord knows!" responded Cam. "Down to the Kaws' nests, I reckon."
"He was cuttin' east along the Fingal Creek bluff after he'd made off to
the southwest, the other night, when I was after the cows," broke in
O'mie, who was sitting on the lowest step listening with all his ears.
"Was cuttin' straight to the river. Only that's right by the Hermit's
Cave an' he couldn't cross to the Osages there."
"Reckon he zigzagged back to town to get somethin' he forgot at Conlow's
shop," put in Cam. "Didn't find any dead dogs nor children next
mornin', did ye, O'mie?"
Conlow kept the vilest whiskey ever sold to a poor drink-thirsty
Redskin. Everybody knew it except those whom the grand jury called into
counsel. I saw my father's brow darken.
"Conlow will meet his match one of these days," he muttered.
"That's why we are runnin' you for judge," said Cam. "This cussed
country needs you in every office it's got to clean out that gang that
robs an' cheats the Injuns, an' then makes 'em ravin' crazy with
drinkin'. They's more 'n Conlow to blame, though, Judge. Keep one eye on
the Government agents and Indian traders."
"I wonder where Jean did go anyhow," O'mie whispered to me. "Let's foind
out an' give him a surprise party an' a church donation some night."
"What does he come here so much for, anyhow?" I questioned.
"I don't know," replied O'mie. "Why can't he stay Injun? What'll he do
wid the greatest common divisor an' the indicative mood an' the Sea of
Azov, an' the Zambezi River, when he's learned 'em, anyhow? Phil,
begorra, I b'lave that cussed Redskin is in this town fur trouble, an'
you jist remember he'll git it one av these toimes. He ain't natural
Injun. Uncle Cam is right. He's not like them Osages that comes here
annuity days. All that's Osage about him is his clothes."
While we were talking, Jean Pahusca came silently into the company and
sat down under the oak tree shading the walk. He never looked less like
an Indian than he did that summer morning lounging lazily in the shade.
The impenetrable savage face had now an expression of ease and superior
self-possession, making it handsome. Unlike the others of his race who
came and went about Springvale, Jean's trappings were always bright and
fresh, and his every muscle had the poetry of motion. In all our games
he was an easy victor. He never clambered about the cliff as we did, he
simply slid up and down like a lizard. Jim Conlow was built to race, but
Jean skimmed the ground like a bird. He could outwrestle every boy
except O'mie (nobody had ever held that Irishman if he wanted to get
away), and his grip was like steel. We all fought him by turns and he
defeated everyone until my turn came. From me he would take no chance of
defeat, however much the boys taunted him with being afraid of Phil
Baronet. For while he had a quickness that I lacked, I knew I had a
muscular strength he could not break. I disliked him at first on
Marjie's account; and when she grew accustomed to his presence and
almost forgot her fear, I detested him. And never did I dislike him so
much before as on this summer morning when we sat about the shady
veranda of the Cambridge House. Nobody else, however, gave any heed to
the Indian boy picturesquely idling there on the blue-grass.
Down the street came Lettie Conlow and Mary Gentry with Marjory Whately,
all chatting together. They turned at the tavern oak and came up the
flag-stone walk toward the veranda. I could not tell you to-day what my
lady wears in the social functions where I sometimes have the honor to
be a guest. I am a man, and silks and laces confuse me. Yet I remember
three young girls in a frontier town more than forty years ago. Mary
Gentry was slender--"skinny," we called her to tease her. Her dark-blue
calico dress was clean and prim. Lettie Conlow was fat. Her skin was
thick and muddy, and there was a brown mole below her ear. Her black,
slick braids of hair were my especial dislike. She had no neck to speak
of, and when she turned her head the creases above her fat shoulders
deepened. I might have liked Lettie but for her open preference for me.
Everybody knew this preference, and she annoyed me exceedingly. This
morning she wore a thin old red lawn cut down from her mother's gown. A
ruffle of the same lawn flopped about her neck. As they came near, her
black eyes sought mine as usual, but I saw only the floppy red
ruffle--and Marjie. Marjie looked sweet and cool in a fresh starched
gingham, with her round white arms bare to the elbows, and her white
shapely neck, with its dainty curves and dimples. The effect was
heightened by the square-cut bodice, with its green and white gingham
bands edged with a Hamburg something, narrow and spotless. How unlike
she was to Lettie in her flimsy trimmings! Marjie's hair was coiled in a
knot on the top of her head, and the little ringlets curved about her
forehead and at the back of her neck. Somehow, with her clear pink
cheeks and that pale green gown, I could think only of the wild roses
that grew about the rocks on the bluff this side of the Hermit's Cave.
Marjie smiled kindly down at Jean as she passed him. There was always a
tremor of fear in that smile; and he knew it and gloried in it.
"Good-morning, Jean," she said in that soft voice I loved to hear.
"Good-morning, Star-face," Jean smiled back at her; and his own face was
transfigured for the instant, as his still black eyes followed her. The
blood in my veins turned to fire at that look. Our eyes met and for one
long moment we gazed steadily at each other. As I turned away I saw
Lettie Conlow watching us both, and I knew instinctively that she and
Jean Pahusca would sometime join forces against me.
"Well, if you lassies ain't a sight good for sore eyes, I'll never tell
it," Cam shouted heartily, squinting up at the girls with his
good-natured glance. "You're cool as October an' twicet as sweet an'
fine. Go in and let Dollie give you some hot berry pie."
"To cool 'em off," O'mie whispered in my ear. "Nothin' so coolin' as a
hot berry pie in July. Let's you and me go to the creek an' thaw out."
That evening Jean Pahusca found the jug supposed to be locked in
Conlow's chest of tools inside his shop. I had found where that red
forge light came from, and had watched it from my window many a night.
When it winked and blinked, I knew somebody inside the shop was passing
between it and the line of the chink. I did not speak of it. I was never
accused of telling all I knew. My father often said I would make a good
witness for my attorney in a suit at law.
Among the Indians who had come for their stipend on this annuity day was
a strong young Osage called Hard Rope, who always had a roll of money
when he went out of town. I remember that night my father did not come
home until very late; and when Aunt Candace asked him if there was
anything the matter, I heard him answer carelessly:
"Oh, no. I've been looking after a young Osage they call Hard Rope, who
needed me."
I was sleepy, and forgot all about his words then. Long afterwards I had
good reason for knowing through this same Hard Rope, how well an Indian
can remember a kindness. He never came to Springvale again. And when I
next saw him I had forgotten that I had ever known him before. However,
I had seen the blinking red glare down the slope that evening and I knew
something was going on. Anyhow, Jean Pahusca, crazed with drink, had
stolen Tell Mapleson's pony and created a reign of terror in the street
until he disappeared down the trail to the southwest.
"It's a wonder old Tell doesn't shoot that Injun," Irving Whately
remarked to a group in his store. "He's quick enough with firearms."
"Well," said Cam Gentry, squinting across the counter with his
shortsighted eyes, "there's somethin' about that 'Last Chance' store and
about this town I don't understand. There's a nigger in the wood-pile,
or an Injun in the blankets, somewhere. I hope it won't be long till
this thing is cleared up and we can know whether we do know anything, or
don't know it. I'm gettin' mystifieder daily." And Cam sat down
chuckling.
"Anyhow, we won't see that Redskin here for a spell, I reckon," broke in
Amos Judson, Whately's clerk. And with this grain of comfort, we forgot
him for a time.
One lazy Saturday afternoon in early August, O'mie and I went for a swim
on the sand-bar side of the Deep Hole under the Hermit's Cave. I had
something to tell O'mie. All the boys trusted him with their
confidences. We had slid quietly down the river; somehow, it was too hot
to be noisy, and we were lying on a broad, flat stone letting the warm
water ripple over us. A huge bowlder on the sand just beyond us threw a
sort of shadow over our brown faces as we rested our heads on the sand.
"O'mie," I began, "I saw something last night."
"Well, an' phwat did somethin' do to you?" He was blowing at the water,
which was sliding gently over his chest.
"That's what I want to tell you if you will shut up that red flannel
mouth a minute."
"The crimson fabric is now closed be order av the Coort," grinned
O'mie.
"O'mie, I waked up suddenly last night. It was clear moonlight, and I
looked out of the window. There right under it, on a black pony just
like Tell Mapleson's, was Jean Pahusca. He was staring up at the window.
He must have seen me move for he only stayed a minute and then away he
went. I watched him till he had passed Judson's place and was in the
shadows beyond the church. He had on a new red blanket with a circle of
white right in the middle, a good target for an arrow, only I'd never
sneak up behind him. If I fight him I'll do it like a white man, from
the front."
"Then ye'll be dead like a white man, from the front clear back,"
declared O'mie. "But hadn't ye heard? This mornin' ould Tell was showin'
Tell's own pony he said he brought back from down at Westport. He got
home late las' night. An' Tell, he pipes up an' says, 'There was a arrow
fastened in its mane when I see it this mornin', but his dad took no
notice whatsoever av the boy's sayin'; just went on that it was the one
Jean Pahusca had stole when he was drunk last. What does it mean, Phil?
Is Jean hidin' out round here again? I wish the cuss would go to Santy
Fee with the next train down the trail an' go to Spanish bull fightin'.
He's just cut out for that, begorra; fur he rides like a Comanche. It ud
be a sort av disgrace to the bull though. I've got nothin' agin bulls."
"O'mie, I don't understand; but let's keep still. Some day when he gets
so drunk he'll kill one of the grand jury, maybe the rest of them and
the coroner can indict him for something."
We lay still in the warm water. Sometimes now in the lazy hot August
afternoons I can hear the rippling song of the Neosho as it prattled and
gurgled on its way. Suddenly O'mie gave a start and in a voice low and
even but intense he exclaimed:
"For the Lord's sake, wud ye look at that? And kape still as a snake
while you're doin' it."
Lying perfectly still, I looked keenly about me, seeing nothing unusual.
"Look up across yonder an' don't bat an eye," said O'mie, low as a
whisper.
I looked up toward the Hermit's Cave. Sitting on a point of rock
overhanging the river was an Indian. His back was toward us and his
brilliant red blanket had a white circle in the centre.
"He's not seen us, or he'd niver set out there like that," and O'mie
breathed easier. "He could put an arrow through us here as aisy as to
snap a string, an' nobody'd live to tell the tale. Phil Bar'net, he's
kapin' den in that cave, an' the devil must have showed him how to git
up there."
A shout up-stream told of other boys coming down to our swimming place.
You have seen a humming bird dart out of sight. So the Indian on the
rock far above us vanished at that sound.
"That's Bill Mead comin'; I know his whoop. I wish I knew which side av
that Injun's head his eyes is fastened on," said O'mie, still motionless
in the water. "If he's watchin' us up there, I'm a turtle till the sun
goes down."
A low peal of thunder rolled out of the west and a heavy black cloud
swept suddenly over the sun. The blue shadow of the bluff fell upon the
Neosho and under its friendly cover we scrambled into our clothes and
scudded out of sight among the trees that covered the east bottom land.
"Now, how did he ever get to that place, O'mie?" I questioned.
"I don't know. But if he can get there, I can too."
Poor O'mie! he did not know how true a prophecy he was uttering.
"Let's kape this to oursilves, Phil," counselled my companion. "If too
many knows it Tell may lose another pony, or somebody's dead dog may
float down the stream like the ould hermit did. Let's burn him out av
there oursilves. Then we can adorn our own tepee wid that soft black La
Salle-Marquette-Hennepin French scalp."
I agreed, and we went our way burdened by a secret dangerous but
fascinating to boys like ourselves.
CHAPTER IV
IN THE PRAIRIE TWILIGHT
The spacious prairie is helper to a spacious life.
Big thoughts are nurtured here, with little friction.
--QUAYLE.
By the time I was fifteen I was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as
my father. Boy-like, I was prodigal of my bounding vigor, which had not
tempered down to the strength of my mature manhood. It was well for me
that a sobering responsibility fell on me early, else I might have
squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy
story-teller whose sixty years sit lightly on him, there would have been
only a ripple in the sod of the curly mesquite on the Plains and a
little heap of dead dust, turned to the inert earth again. The West
grows large men, as it grows strong, beautiful women; and I know that
the boys and girls then differed only in surroundings and opportunity
from the boys and girls of Springvale to-day. Life is finer in its
appointments now; but I doubt if it is any more free or happy than it
was in those days when we went to oyster suppers and school exhibitions
up in the Red Range neighborhood. Among us there was the closest
companionship, as there needs must be in a lonely and spacious land.
What can these lads and lasses of to-day know of a youth nurtured in the
atmosphere of peril and uncertainty such as every one of us knew in
those years of border strife and civil war? Sometimes up here, when I
see the gay automobile parties spinning out upon the paved street and
over that broad highway miles and miles to the west, I remember the time
when we rode our Indian ponies thither, and the whole prairie was our
boulevard.
Marjie could ride without bridle or saddle, and she sat a horse like a
cattle queen. The four Anderson children were wholesome and
good-natured, as they were good scholars, and they were good riders.
They were all tow-headed and they all lisped, and Bud was the most
hopeless case among them. Flaxen-haired, baby-faced youngster that he
was, he was the very first in all our crowd to learn to drop on the side
of his pony and ride like a Comanche. O'mie and I also succeeded in
learning that trick; Tell Mapleson broke a collar-bone, attempting it;
and Jim Conlow, as O'mie said, "knocked the 'possum' aff his mug thryin'
to achave the art." He fractured the bones of his nose, making his face
a degree more homely than it was before. Then there were the Mead boys
to be counted on everywhere. Dave went West years ago, made his fortune,
and then began to traffic with the Orient. His name is better known in
Hong-Kong now than it is in Springvale. He never married, and it used to
be said that a young girl's grave up in the Red Range graveyard held all
his hope and love. I do not know; for he left home the year I came up to
Topeka to enlist, and Springvale was like the bitter waters of Marah to
my spirit. But that comes later.
Bill Mead married Bessie Anderson, and the seven little tow-headed
Meads, stair-stepping down the years, played with the third generation
here as we used to play in the years gone by. Bill is president of the
bank on the corner where the old Whately store stood and is a
share-holder in several big Kansas City concerns. Bessie lost her rosy
cheeks years ago, but she has her seven children; the youngest of them,
Phil, named for me, will graduate from the Kansas University this year.
Lettie Conlow was always on the uncertain list with us. No Conlow could
do much with a horse except to put shoes under it. It was a trick of
hers to lag behind and call to me to tighten a girth, while Marjie raced
on with Dave Mead or Tell Mapleson. Tell liked Lettie, and it rasped my
spirit to be made the object of her preference and his jealousy. Once
when we were alone his anger boiled hot, and he shook his fist at me and
cried:
"You mean pup! You want to take my girl from me. I can lick you, and I'm
going to do it."
I was bigger than Tell, and he knew my strength.
"I wish to goodness you would," I said. "I'd rather be licked than to
have a girl I don't care for always smiling at me."
Tell's face fell, and he grinned sheepishly.
"Don't you really care for Lettie, Phil? She says you like Bess
Anderson."
Was that a trick of Lettie's to put Marjie out of my thought, I
wondered, or did she really know my heart? I distrusted Lettie. She was
so like her black-eyed father. But I had guarded my own feelings, and
the boys and girls had not guessed what Marjie was to me.
It was about this time that Father Le Claire, a French priest who had
been a missionary in the Southwest, began to come and go about
Springvale. His work lay mostly with the Osages farther down the Neosho,
but he labored much among the Kaws. He was a kindly-spirited man,
reserved, but gentle and courteous ever, and he was very fond of
children. He was always in town on annuity days, when the tribes came up
for their quarterly stipend from the Government. Mapleson was the Indian
agent. The "Last Chance," unable to compete with its commercial rival,
the Whately house, had now a drug store in the front, a harness shop in
the rear and a saloon in the cellar. It was to this "Last Chance" that
the Indians came for their money; and it was Father Le Claire who
piloted many of them out to the trails leading southward and started
them on the way to their villages, sober and possessed of their
Government allowance or its equivalent in honest merchandise.
From the first visit the good priest took to Jean Pahusca, and he helped
to save the young brave from many a murdering spell.
To O'mie and myself, however, remained the resolve to drive him from
Springvale; for, boylike, we watched him more closely than the men did,
and we knew him better. He was not the only one of our town who drank
too freely. Four decades ago the law was not the righteous force it is
to-day, and we looked upon many sights which our children, thank Heaven,
never see in Kansas.
"Keep out of that Redskin's way when he's drunk," was Cam Gentry's
advice to us. "You know he'd scalp his grandmother if he could get hold
of her then."
We kept out of his way, but we bided our time.
Father Le Claire had another favorite in Springvale, and that was O'mie.
He said little to the Irish orphan lad, but there sprang up a sort of
understanding between the two. Whenever he was in town, O'mie was not
far away from him; and the boy, frank and confidential in everything
else, grew strangely silent when we talked of the priest. I spoke of
this to my father one day. He looked keenly at me and said quietly:
"You would make a good lawyer, Phil, you seem to know what a lawyer must
know; that is, what people think as well as what they say."
"I don't quite understand, father," I replied.
"Then you won't make a good lawyer. It's the understanding that makes
the lawyer," and he changed the subject.
My mind was not greatly disturbed over O'mie, however. I was young and
neither I nor my companions were troubled by anything but the realities
of the day. Limited as we were by circumstances in this new West, we
made the most of our surroundings and of one another. How much the
prairies meant to us, as they unrolled their springtime glory! From the
noonday blue of the sky overhead to the deep verdure of the land below,
there ranged every dainty tint of changeful coloring. Nature lavished
her wealth of loveliness here, that the dream of the New Jerusalem might
not seem a mere phantasy of the poet disciple who walked with the Christ
and was called of Him "The Beloved."
The prairies were beautiful to me at any hour, but most of all I loved
them in the long summer evenings when the burst of sunset splendor had
deepened into twilight. Then the afterglow softened to that purple
loveliness indescribably rare and sweet, wreathed round by gray
cloudfolds melting into exquisite pink, the last far echo of the
daylight's glory. It is said that any land is beautiful to us only by
association. Was it the light heart of my boyhood, and my merry
comrades, and most of all, the little girl who was ever in my thoughts,
that gave grandeur to these prairies and filled my memory with pictures
no artist could ever color on canvas? I cannot say, for all these have
large places in my mind's treasury.
From early spring to late October it was a part of each day's duty for
the youngsters of Springvale to go in the evening after the cows that
ranged on the open west. We went together, of course, and, of course, we
rode our ponies. Sometimes we went far and hunted long before we found
the cattle. The tenderest grasses grew along the draws, and these often
formed a deep wrinkle on the surface where our whole herd was hidden
until we came to the very edge of the depression. Sometimes the herd was
scattered, and every one must be rounded up and headed toward town
before we left the prairie. And then we loitered on the homeward way and
sang as only brave, free-spirited boys and girls can sing. And the
prairie caught our songs and sent them rippling far and far over its
clear, wide spaces.
As the twilight deepened, we drew nearer together, for comradeship meant
protection. Some years before, a boy had been stolen out on these
prairies one day by a band of Kiowas, and that night the mother drowned
herself in the Neosho above town. Her home had been in a little stone
cabin round the north bend of the river. It was in the sheltered draw
just below where the one lone cottonwood tree made a landmark on the
Plains--a deserted habitation now, and said to be haunted by the spirit
of the unhappy mother. The child's father, a handsome French Canadian,
had turned Plainsman and gone to the Southwest and had not been heard of
afterwards. While we had small grounds for fear, we kept our ponies in a
little group coming in side by side on the home stretch. All the purple
shadows of those sweet summer twilights are blended with the memories of
those happy care-free hours.
In the long summer days the cows ranged wider to the west, and we
wandered farther in our evening jaunts and lingered later in the
fragrant draws where the sweet grasses were starred with many brilliant
blossoms. That is how we happened to be away out on the northwest
prairie that evening when Jean Pahusca found us, the evening when O'mie
read my secret in my tell-tale face. Even to-day a storm cloud in the
northwest with the sunset flaming against its jagged edges recalls that
scene. The cattle had all been headed homeward, and we were racing our
ponies down the long slope to the south. On the right the draw, watched
over by the big cottonwood, breaks through the height and finds its way
to the Neosho. The watershed between the river and Fingal's Creek is
here only a high swell, and straight toward the west it is level as a
floor.
The air of a hot afternoon had begun to ripple in cool little waves
against our faces. All the glory of the midsummer day was ending in
the grandeur of a crimson sunset shaded northward by that threatening
thundercloud. With our ponies lined up for one more race we were just on
the point of starting, when a whoop, a savage yell, and Jean Pahusca
rose above the edge of the draw behind us and dashed toward us headlong.
We knew he was drunk, for since Father Le Claire's coming among us he
had come to be a sort of gentleman Indian when he was sober; and we
caught the naked gleam of the short sharp knife he always wore in a
leather sheath at his belt. We were thrown into confusion, and some
ponies became unmanageable at once. It is the way of their breed to turn
traitor with the least sign of the rider's fear. At Jean's second whoop
there was a stampede. Marjie's pony gave a leap and started off at full
gallop toward the level west. Hers was the swiftest horse of all, but
the Indian coming at an angle had the advantage of space, and he singled
her out in a moment. Her hair hung down in two heavy braids, and as she
gave one frightened glance backward I saw her catch them both in one
hand and draw them over her shoulder as if to save them from the
scalping knife.
My pony leaped to follow her but my quick eye caught the short angle of
the Indian's advantage. I turned, white and anguish-stricken, toward my
companions. Then it was that I heard O'mie's low words:
"Bedad, Phil, an' that's how it is wid ye, is it? Then we've got to kill
that Injun, just for grandeur."
His voice set a mighty force tingling in every nerve. The thrill of that
moment is mine after all these years, for in that instant I was born
again. I believe no terror nor any torture could have stayed me then,
and death would have seemed sublime if only I could have flung myself
between the girl and this drink-crazed creature seeking in his
irresponsible madness to take her life. It was not alone that this was
Marjie, and there swept over me the full realization of what she meant
to me. Something greater than my own love and life leaped into being
within me. It was the swift, unworded comprehension of a woman's worth,
of the sacredness of her life, and her divine right to the protection of
her virtue; a comprehension of the beauty and blessing of the American
home, of the obedient daughter, the loving wife, the Madonna mother, of
all that these mean as the very foundation rock of our nation's strength
and honor. It swept my soul like a cleansing fire. The words for this
came later, but the force of it swayed my understanding in that
instant's crisis. Some boys grow into manhood as the years roll along,
and some leap into it at a single bound. It was a boy, Phil Baronet, who
went out after the cows that careless summer day so like all the other
summer days before it. It was a man, Philip Baronet, who followed them
home that dark night, fearing neither the roar of the angry storm cloud
that threshed in fury above us, nor any human being, though he were
filled with the rage of madness.
At O'mie's word I dashed after Marjie. Behind me came Bud Anderson and
Dave Mead, followed by every other boy and girl. O'mie rode beside me,
and not one of us thought of himself. It was all done in a flash, and I
marvel that I tell its mental processes as if they were a song sung in
long-metre time. But it is all so clear to me. I can see the fiery
radiance of that sky blotted by the two riders before me. I can hear the
crash of the ponies' feet, and I can even feel the sweep of wind out of
that storm-cloud turning the white under-side of the big cottonwood's
leaves uppermost and cutting cold now against the hot air. And then
there rises up that ripple of ground made by the ring of the Osage's
tepee in the years gone by. Marjie deftly swerved her pony to the south
and skirted that little ridge of ground with a graceful curve, as though
this were a mere racing game and not a life-and-death ride. Jean's horse
plunged at the tepee ring, leaped to the little hollow beyond it,
stumbled and fell, and, pellmell, like a stampede of cattle, we were
upon him.
I never could understand how Dave Mead headed the crowd back and kept
the whole mass from piling up on the fallen Indian and those nearest to
him. Nor do I understand why some of us were not crushed or kicked out
of life in that _melee_ of ponies and riders struggling madly together.
What I do know is that Bud Anderson, who was not thrown from his horse,
caught Jean's pony by the bridle and dragged it clear of the mass. It
was O'mie's quick hand that wrested that murderous knife from the
Indian's grasp, and it was my strong arm that held him with a grip of
iron. The shock sobered him instantly. He struggled a moment, and then
the cunning that always deceived us gained control. The Indian spirit
vanished, and with something masterful in his manner he relaxed all
effort. Lifting his eyes to mine with no trace of resentment in their
impenetrable depths, he said evenly:
"Let me go. I was drunk. I was fool."
"Let him go, Phil. He did act kinder drunk," Bill Mead urged, and I
loosed my hold. I knew instinctively that we were safe now, as I knew
also that this submission of Jean Pahusca's must be paid for later with
heavy interest by somebody.
"Here'th your horth; s'pothe you thkite," lisped Bud Anderson.
Jean sprang upon his pony and dashed off. We watched him ride away down
the long slope. In a few moments another horseman joined him, and they
took the trail toward the Kaw reservation. It was Father Le Claire
riding with the Indian into the gathering shadows of the south.
I turned to Marjie standing beside me. Her big brown eyes were luminous
with tears, and her face was as white as my mother's face was on the day
the sea left its burden on the Rockport sands. It was hate that made
Jean Pahusca veil his countenance for me a moment before. Something of
which hate can never know made me look down at her calmly. O'mie's hand
was on my shoulder and his eyes were on us both. There was a quaint
approval in his glance toward me. He knew the self-control I needed
then.
"Phil saved you, Marjie," Mary Gentry exclaimed.
"No, he saved Jean," put in Lettie.
"And O'mie saved Phil," Bess Anderson urged. "Just grabbed that knife in
time."
"Well, I thaved mythelf," Bud piped in.
He never could find any heroism in himself who, more than any other boy
among us, had a record for pulling drowning boys out of the Deep Hole by
the Hermit's Cave, and killing rattlesnakes in the cliff's crevices,
and daring the dark when the border ruffians were hiding about
Springvale.
An angry growl of thunder gave us warning of the coming storm. In our
long race home before its wrath, in the dense darkness wrapping the
landscape, we could only trust to the ponies to keep the way. Marjie
rode close by my side that night, and more than once my hand found hers
in the darkness to assure her of protection. O'mie, bless his red head!
crowded Lettie to the far side of the group, keeping Tell on the other
side of her.
When I climbed the hill on Cliff Street that night I turned by the
bushes and caught the gleam of Marjie's light. I gave the whistling call
we had kept for our signal these years, and I saw the light waver as a
good-night signal.
That night I could not sleep. The storm lasted for hours, and the rain
swept in sheets across the landscape. The darkness was intense, and the
midsummer heat of the day was lost in the chill of that drouth-breaking
torrent. After midnight I went to my father's room. He had not retired,
but was sitting by the window against which the rain beat heavily. The
light burned low, and his fine face was dimly outlined in the shadows. I
sat down beside his knee as I was wont to do in childhood.
"Father," I began hesitatingly, "Father, do you still love my mother?
Could you care for anybody else? Does a man ever--" I could not say
more. Something so like tears was coming into my voice that my cheeks
grew hot.
My father's hand rested gently on my head, his fingers stroking the
ripples of my hair. White as it is now, it was dark and wavy then, as my
mother's had been. It was the admiration of the women and girls, which
admiration always annoyed and embarrassed me. In and out of those set
waves above my forehead his fingers passed caressingly. He knew the
heart of a boy, and he sat silent there, letting me feel that I could
tell him anything.
"Have you come to the cross-roads, Phil?" he asked gently. "I was
thinking of you as I sat here. Maybe that brought you in. Your boyhood
must give way to manhood soon. These times of civil war change
conditions for our children," he mused to himself, rather than spoke to
me. "We expect a call to the front soon, Phil. When I am gone, I want
you to do a man's part in Springvale. You are only a boy, I know, but
you have a man's strength, my son."
"And a man's spirit, too," I cried, springing up and standing erect
before him. "Let me go with you, Father."
"No, Phil, you must stay here and help to protect these homes, just as
we men must go out to fight for them. To the American people war doesn't
mean glory nor conquest. It means safety and freedom, and these begin
and end in the homes of our land."
The impulse wakened on the prairie that evening at the sight of Marjie's
peril leaped up again within me.
"I'll do my best. But tell me, Father," I had dropped down beside him
again, "do you still love my mother? Does a man love the same woman
always?"
Few boys of my age would have asked such a question of a man. My father
took both of my hands into his own strong hands and in the dim light he
searched my face with his keen eyes.
"Men differ in their natures, my boy. Even fathers and sons do not
always think alike. I can speak only for myself. Do I love the woman who
gave you birth? Oh, Phil!"
No need for him to say more. Over his face there swept an expression of
tenderness such as I have never seen save as at long intervals I have
caught it on the face of a sweet-browed mother bending above a sleeping
babe. I rose up before him, and stooping, I kissed his forehead. It was
a sacred hour, and I went out from his presence with a new bond binding
us together who had been companions all my days. My dreams when I fell
asleep at last were all of Marjie, and through them all her need for a
protector was mingled with a still greater need for my guardianship. It
came from two women who were strangers to me, whose faces I had never
seen before.
CHAPTER V
A GOOD INDIAN
Underneath that face like summer's ocean,
Its lips as moveless, and its brow as clear,
Slumbers a whirlwind of the heart's emotion,
Love, hatred, pride, hope, sorrow,--all save fear.
Cast in the setting of to-day, after such an attempt on human life as we
broke up on the prairie, Jean Pahusca would have been hiding in the
coverts of Oklahoma, or doing time at the Lansing penitentiary for
attempted assault with intent to kill. The man who sold him the whiskey
would be in the clutches of the law, carrying his case up to the Supreme
Court, backed by the slush fund of the brewers' union. The Associated
Press would give the incident a two-inch heading and a one-inch story;
and the snail would stay on the thorn, and the lark keep on the wing.
Even in that time Springvale would not have tolerated the Indian among
us had it not been that the minds of the people were fermenting with
other things. We were on the notorious old border between free and slave
lands, whose tragedies rival the tales of the Scottish border. Kansas
had been a storm centre since the day it became a Territory, and the
overwhelming theme was negro slavery. Every man was marked as "pro" or
"anti." There was no neutral ground. Springvale was by majority a
Free-State town. A certain element with us, however, backed up by the
Fingal's Creek settlement, declared openly and vindictively for slavery.
It was from this class that we had most to fear. While the best of our
people were giving their life-blood to save a nation, these men connived
with border raiders who would not hesitate to take the life and property
of every Free-State citizen. When our soldiers marched away to fields of
battle, they knew they were leaving an enemy behind them, and no man's
home was safe. Small public heed was paid then to the outbreak of a
drunken Indian boy who had been overcome in a scrap out on the prairie
when the youngsters were hunting their cows.
Where the bushes grow over the edge of the bluff at the steep bend in
Cliff Street, a point of rock projects beyond the rough side. By a rude
sort of stone steps beside this point we could clamber down many feet to
the bush-grown ledge below. This point had been a meeting-place and
playground for Marjie and myself all those years. We named it
"Rockport" after the old Massachusetts town. Marjie could hear my call
from the bushes and come up to the half-way place between our two homes.
The stratum of rock below this point was full of cunning little crevices
and deep hiding-places. One of these, known only to Marjie and myself,
we called our post-office, and many a little note, scrawled in childish
hand, but always directed to "Rockport" like a real address on the
outside fold, we left for each other to find. Sometimes it was a
message, sometimes it was only a joke, and sometimes it was just a line
of childish love-making. We always put our valentines in this private
house of Uncle Sam's postal service. Maybe that was why the other boys
and girls did not couple our names together oftener. Everybody knew who
got valentines at the real post-office and where they came from.
On the evening after the storm there was no loitering on the prairie.
While we knew there was no danger, a half-dozen boys brought the cows
home long before the daylight failed. At sunset I went down to
"Rockport," intending to whistle to Marjie. How many a summer evening
together here we had watched the sunset on the prairie! To-night, for no
reason that I could give, I parted the bushes and climbed down to the
ledge below, intending in a moment to come up again. I paused to listen
to the lowing of some cows down the river. All the sweet sounds and
odors of evening were in the air, and the rain-washed woodland of the
Neosho Valley was in its richest green. I did not notice that the bushes
hid me until, as I turned, I caught a glimpse of a red blanket, with a
circular white centre, sliding up that stairway. An instant later, a
call, my signal whistle, sounded from the rock above. I stood on the
ledge under the point, my heart the noisiest thing in all that summer
landscape full of soft twilight utterances. I was too far below the
cliff's edge to catch any answering call, but I determined to fling that
blanket and its wearer off the height if any harm should even threaten.
Presently I heard a light footstep, and Marjie parted the bushes above
me. Before she could cry out, Jean spoke to her. His voice was clear and
sweet as I had never heard it before, and I do not wonder it reassured
her.
"No afraid, Star-face, no afraid. Jean wants one word."
Marjie did not move, and I longed to let her know how near I was to her,
and yet I dared not till I knew his purpose.
"Star-face," he began, "Jean drink no more. Jean promise Padre Le
Claire, never, never, Star-face, not be afraid anymore, never, never.
Jean good Indian now. Always keep evil from Star-face."
How full of affection were his tones. I wondered at his broken Indian
tongue, for he had learned good English, and sometimes he surpassed us
all in the terse excellence and readiness of his language. Why should he
hesitate so now?
"Star-face,"--there was a note of self-control in his pleading
voice,--"I will never drink again. I would not do harm to you. Don't be
afraid."
I heard her words then, soft and sweet, with that tremor of fear she
could never overcome.
"I hope you won't, Jean."
Then the bushes crackled, as she turned and sped away.
I was just out of sight again when that red blanket slipped down the
rocks and disappeared over the side of the ledge in the jungle of bushes
below me.
A little later, when Mary Gentry and O'mie and I sat with Marjie on the
Whately doorstep, she told us what Jean had said.
"Do you really think he will be good now?" asked Mary. She was always
credulous.
"Yes, of course," Marjie answered carelessly.
Her reply angered me. She seemed so ready to trust the word of this
savage who twenty-four hours before had tried to scalp her. Did his
manner please Marjie? Was the foolish girl attracted by this picturesque
creature? I clenched my fists in the dark.
"Girls are such silly things," I said to myself. "I thought better of
Marjie, but she is like all the rest." And then I blushed in the dark
for having such mean thoughts.
"Don't you think he will be good now, Phil?"
I did not know how eagerly she waited for my answer. Poor Marjie! To her
the Indian name was always a terror. Before I could reply O'mie broke
in:
"Marjory Whately, ye'll excuse me fur referrin' to it, but I ain't no
bigger than you are."
O'mie had not grown as the most of us had, and while he had a lightning
quickness of movement, and a courage that never faltered, he was no
match for the bigger boys in strength and endurance. Marjie was rounding
into graceful womanhood now, but she was not of the slight type. She
never lost her dimples, and the vigorous air of the prairies gave her
that splendid physique that made her a stranger to sickness and kept the
wild-rose bloom on her fair cheeks. O'mie did not outweigh her.
"Ye'll 'scuse me," O'mie went on, "fur the embarrassin' statement; but I
ain't big, I run mostly to brains, while Phil here, an' Bill, an' Dave,
an' Bud, an' Possum Conlow runs mostly to beef; an' yet, bein' small, I
ain't afraid none of your good Injun. But take this warnin' from me, an
old friend that knew your grandmother in long clothes, that you kape
wide of Jean Pahusca's trail. Don't you trust him."
Marjie gave a little shiver. Had I been something less a fool then I
should have known that it was a shiver of fear, but I was of the age to
know everything, and O'mie sitting there had learned my heart in a
moment on the prairie the evening before. And then I wanted Marjie to
trust to me. Her eyes were like stars in the soft twilight, and her
white face lost its color, but she did not look at me.
"Don't you trust that mock-turtle Osage, Marjorie, don't." O'mie was
more deeply in earnest than we thought.
"But O'mie," Marjie urged, "Jean was just as earnest as you are now;
and you'd say so, too, Phil, if you had heard him."
She was right. The words I had heard from above the rock rang true.
"And if he really wants to do better, what have we all been told in the
Sunday-school? 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'"
I could have caught that minor chord of fear had I been more master of
myself at that moment.
"Have ye talked wid Father Le Claire?" asked O'mie. "Let's lave the
baste to him. Phil, whin does your padre and his Company start to subdue
the rebillious South?"
"Pretty soon, father says."
"My father is going too," Marjie said gently, "and Henry Anderson and
Cris Mead, and all the men."
"Oh, well, we'll take care of the widders an' orphans." O'mie spoke
carelessly, but he added, "It's grand whin such min go out to foight fur
a country. Uncle Cam wants to go if he's aqual to the tests; you know
he's too near-sighted to see a soldier. Why don't you go too, Phil?
You're big as your dad, an' not half so essential to Springvale. Just
lave it to sich social ornimints as me an' Marjie's 'good Injun.'"
Again Marjie shivered.
"I want to go, but father won't let me leave--Aunt Candace."
"An' he's right, as is customary wid him. You nade your aunt to take
care of you. He couldn't be stoppin' the battle to lace up your shoes
an' see that you'd washed your neck. Come, Mary, little girls must be
gettin' home." And he and Mary trotted down the slope toward the
twinkling lights of the Cambridge House.
Before I reached home, O'mie had overtaken me, saying:
"Come, Phil, let's rest here a minute."
We were just by the bushes that shut off my "Rockport," so we parted
them and sat down on the point of rock. The moon was rising, red in the
east, and the Neosho Valley below us was just catching its gleams on the
treetops, while each point of the jagged bluff stood out silvery white
above the dark shadows. A thousand crickets and katydids were chirping
in the grass. It was only on the town side that the bushes screened this
point. All the west prairie was in that tender gloom that would roll
back in shadowy waves before the rising moon.
"Phil," O'mie began, "don't be no bigger fool than nature cut you out
fur to be. Don't you trust that 'good Injun' of Marjie's, but kape one
eye on him comin' an t' other 'n on him goin'."
"I don't trust him, O'mie, but he has a voice that deceives. I don't
wonder, being a girl, Marjie is caught by it."
"An' you, bein' a boy," O'mie mimicked,--"Phil, you're enough to turn my
hair rid. But never mind, ye can't trust him. Fur why? He's not to be
trusted. If he was aven Injun clean through you could a little, maybe.
Some Osages has honor to shame a white man,--aven an Irishman,--but he's
not Osage. He's a Kiowa, the kind that stole that little chap years ago
up toward Rid Range. An' he ain't Kiowa altogether nather. The Injun
blood gives him cuteness, but half his cussedness is in that soft black
scalp an' that soft voice sayin', 'Good Injun.' There's some old Louis
XIV somewhere in his family tree. The roots av it may be in the Plains
out here, but some branch is a graft from a Orleans rose-bush. He's got
the blossoms an' the thorns av a Frenchman. An' besides," O'mie added,
"as if us two wise men av the West didn't know, comes Father Le Claire
to me to-day. He's Jean's guide an' counsellor. An' Phil, begorra, them
two looks alike. Same square-cut kind o' foreheads they've got. Annyhow,
I was waterin' the horses down to the ford, an' Father Le Claire comes
on me sudden, ridin' up on the Kaw trail from the south. He blessed me
wid his holy hand and then says quick:
"'O'mie, ye are a lad I can trust!'"
"I nodded, not knowin' why annybody can't be trusted who goes swimmin'
once a week, an' never tastes whiskey, an' don't practise lyin', nor
shirkin' his stunt at the Cambridge House."
"'O'mie,' says he, 'I want to tell you who you must not trust. It is
Jean Pahusca,' says he; 'I wish I didn't nade to say it, but it is me
duty to warn ye. Don't mistreat him, but O'mie, for Heaven's sake, kape
your eyes open, especially when he promises to be good.' It's our stunt,
Phil, to watch him close now he's took to reformin' to the girls."
"O'mie, we know, and Father Le Claire knows, but how can we make those
foolish girls understand? Mary believes everything that's said to her
anyhow, and you heard Marjie to-night. She thinks she should take Jean
at his word."
"Phil, you are all right, seemin'ly. You can lick any av us. You've got
the build av a giant, an' you've beautiful hair an' teeth. An' you are
son an' heir to John Bar'net, which is an asset some av us would love to
possess, bein' orphans, an' the lovely ladies av Springvale is all
bewitched by you; but you are a blind, blitherin' ijit now an' again."
"Well, you heard what Marjie said, and how careless she was."
"Yes, an' I seen her shiver an' turn white the instant too. Phil, she's
doin' that to kape us from bein' unaisy, an' it's costin' her some to
do it. Bless her pretty face! Phil, don't be no bigger fool than ye can
kape from."
In less than a week after the incident on the prairie my father's
Company was called to the firing line of the Civil War and the
responsibilities of life fell suddenly upon me. There was a great
gathering in town on the day the men marched away. Where the opera house
stands now was the corner of a big vacant patch of ground reaching out
toward the creek. To-day it was filled with the crowd come to see the
soldiers and bid them good-bye. A speaker's stand was set up in the yard
of the Cambridge House and the boys in blue were in the broad street
before it. It was the last civilian ceremony for many of them, for that
Kansas Company went up Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga, led the line as
Kansans will ever do, and in the face of a murderous fire they drove the
foeman back. But many of them never came home to wear their laurels of
victory. They lie in distant cemeteries under the shadow of tall
monuments. They lie in old neglected fields, in sunken trenches, by
lonely waysides, and in deep Southern marshes, waiting all the last
great Reunion. If I should live a thousand years, the memory of that
bright summer morning would not fade from my mind.
Dr. Hemingway, pastor of the Presbyterian Church, presided over the
meeting, and the crowd about the soldiers was reinforced by all the
countryside beyond the Neosho and the whole Red Range neighborhood.
Skulking about the edge of the company, or gathered in little groups
around the corners just out of sight, were the pro-slavery sympathizers,
augmented by the Fingal's Creek crowd, who were of the Secession element
clear through. In the doorway of the "Last Chance" sat the Rev. Dodd,
pastor of the Springvale Methodist Church South, taking no part in this
patriotic occasion. Father Le Claire was beside Dr. Hemingway. He said
not a word, but Springvale knew he was a power for peace. He did not
sanction bloodshed even in a righteous cause. Neither would he allow
those who followed his faith to lift a hand against those who did go out
to battle. We trusted him and he never betrayed that trust. This morning
I recalled what O'mie had said about his looking like Jean Pahusca. His
broad hat was pushed back from his square dark forehead; and the hair,
soft and jetty, had the same line about the face. But not one feature
there bespoke an ignoble spirit. I did not understand him, but I was
drawn toward him, as I was repelled by the Indian from the moment I
first saw his head above the bluff on the rainy October evening long
ago.
How little the Kansas boys and girls to-day can understand what that
morning meant to us, when we saw our fathers riding down the Santa Fe
Trail to the east, and waving good-bye to us at the far side of the
ford! How the fire of patriotism burned in our hearts, and how the
sudden loss of all our strongest and best men left us helpless among
secret cruel enemies! And then that spirit of manhood leaped up within
us, the sudden sense of responsibility come to "all the able-bodied
boys" to stand up as a wall of defence about the homes of Springvale.
Too well we knew the dangers. Had we not lived on this Kansas border in
all those plastic years when the mind takes deepest impressions? The
ruffianism of Leavenworth and Lawrence and Osawatomie had been repeated
in the unprotected surroundings of Springvale. The Red Range schoolhouse
had been burned, and the teacher, a Massachusetts man, had been drowned
in a shallow pool near the source of Fingal's Creek, his body fastened
face downward so that a few inches of water were enough for the fiendish
purpose. Eastward the settlers had fled to our town, time and again, to
escape the border raiders, whose coming meant death to the free-spirited
father, and a widow and orphans left destitute beside the smoking embers
of what had been a home. Those were busy days in Kansas, and the memory
of them can yet stir the heart of a man of sixty years.
That morning Dr. Hemingway offered prayer, the prayer of a godly man,
for the souls of men about to be baptized with a baptism of blood that
other men might be free, and a peaceful generation might walk with ease
where their feet trod red-hot ploughshares; a prayer for the strong arm
of God Almighty, to uphold every soldier's hands until the cause of
right should triumph; a prayer for the heavenly Father's protection
about the homes left fatherless for the sake of His children.
And then he prayed for us, "for Philip Baronet, the strong and manly son
of his noble father, John Baronet; for David and William Mead, for John
and Clayton and August Anderson." He prayed for Tell Mapleson, too (Tell
was always square in spite of his Copperhead father), and for "Thomas
O'Meara." We hardly knew whom he meant.
Bud Anderson whispered later, "Thay, O'mie, you'll never get into
kingdom come under an athumed name. Better thtick to 'O'mie.'"
And last of all the good Doctor prayed for the wives and daughters, that
they "be strong and very courageous," doing their part of working and
waiting as bravely as they do who go out to stirring action. Then
ringing speeches followed. I remember them all; but most of all the
words of my father and of Irving Whately are fixed in my mind. My father
lived many years and died one sunset hour when the prairies were in
their autumn glory, died with his face to the western sky, his last
earthly scene that peaceful prairie with the grandeur of a thousand
ever-changing hues building up a wall like to the walls of the New
Jerusalem which Saint John saw in a vision on the Isle of Patmos. There
was
No moaning of the bar
When he put out to sea
for he died beautifully, as he had lived. I never saw Irving Whately
again, for he went down before the rebel fire at Chattanooga; but the
sound of his voice I still can hear.
The words of these men seemed to lift me above the clouds, and what
followed is like a dream. I know that when the speeches were done,
Marjie went forward with the beautiful banner the women of Springvale
had made with their own hands for this Company. I could not hear her
words. They were few and simple, no doubt, for she was never given to
display. But I remember her white dress and her hair parted in front and
coiled low on her neck. I remember the sweet Madonna face of the little
girl, and how modestly graceful she was. I remember how every man held
his breath as she came up to the group seated on the stage, how pink her
cheeks were and how white the china aster bloom nestling against the
ripples of her hair, and how the soldiers cheered that flag and its
bearer. I remember Jean Pahusca, Indian-like, standing motionless, never
taking his eyes from Marjie's face. It was that flag that this Company
followed in its awful charge up Missionary Ridge. And it was Irving
Whately who kept it aloft, the memory of his daughter making it doubly
sacred to him.
And then came the good-byes. Marjie's father gripped my hand, and his
voice was full of tears.
"Take care of them, Phil. I have no son to guard my home, and if we
never come back you will not let harm come to them. You will let me feel
when I am far away that you are shielding my little girl from evil,
won't you, Phil?"
I clenched his hand in mine. "You know I'll do that, Mr. Whately." I
stood up to my full height, young, broad-shouldered, and muscular.
"It will be easier for me, Phil, to know you are here."
I understood him. Mrs. Whately was, of all the women I knew, least able
to do for herself. Marjie was like her father, and, save for her fear of
Indians, no Kansas girl was ever more capable and independent. It has
been my joy that this father trusted me. The flag his daughter put into
his hands that day was his shroud at Chattanooga, and his last moments
were happier for the thought of his little girl in my care.
Aunt Candace and I walked home together after we had waved the last
good-byes to the soldiers. From our doorway up on Cliff Street we
watched that line of men grow dim and blend at last into the eastern
horizon's purple bound. When I turned then and looked down at the town
beyond the slope, it seemed to me that upon me alone rested the burden
of its protection. Driven deep in my boyish soul was the sense of the
sacredness of these homes, and of a man's high duty to keep harm from
them. My father had gone out to battle, not alone to set free an
enslaved race, but to make whole and strong a nation whose roots are in
the homes it defends. So I, left to fill his place, must be the valiant
defender of the defenceless. Such moments of exaltation come to the
young soul, and by such ideals a life is squared.
That evening our little crowd of boys strolled out on the west prairie.
The sunset deepened to the rich afterglow, and all the soft shadows of
evening began to unfold about us. In that quiet, sacred time, standing
out on the wide prairie, with the great crystal dome above us, and the
landscape, swept across by the free winds of heaven, unrolled in all its
dreamy beauty about us, our little company gripped hands and swore our
fealty to the Stars and Stripes. And then and there we gave sacred
pledge and promise to stand by one another and to give our lives if need
be for the protection and welfare of the homes of Springvale.
Busy days followed the going of the soldiers. Somehow the gang of us who
had idled away the summer afternoons in the sand-bar shallows beyond the
Deep Hole seemed suddenly to grow into young men who must not neglect
school nor business duties. Awkwardly enough but earnestly we strove to
keep Springvale a pushing, prosperous community, and while our efforts
were often ludicrous, the manliness of purpose had its effect. It gave
us breadth, this purpose, and broke up our narrow prejudices. I believe
in those first months I would have suffered for the least in Springvale
as readily as for the greatest. Even Lettie Conlow, whose father kept on
shoeing horses as though there were no civil strife in the nation, found
such favor with me as she had never found before. I know now it was only
a boy's patriotic foolishness, but who shall say it was ignoble in its
influence? Marjie was my especial charge. That Fall I did not retire at
night until I had run down to the bushes and given my whistle, and had
seen her window light waver a good-night answer, and I knew she was
safe. I was not her only guardian, however. One crisp autumn night there
was no response to my call, and I sat down on the rocky outcrop of the
steep hill to await the coming of her light in the window. It was a
clear starlight night, and I had no thought of being unseen as I was
quietly watching. Presently, up through the bushes a dark form slid. It
did not stand erect when the street was reached, but crawled with head
up and alert in the deeper shadow of the bluff side of the road. I knew
instinctively that it was Jean Pahusca, and that he had not been
expecting me to be there after my call and had failed to notice me in
his eagerness to creep unseen down the slope. Sometimes in these later
years in a great football game I have watched the Haskell Indians
crawling swiftly up and down the side-lines following the surge of the
players on the gridiron, and I always think of Jean as he crept down the
hill that night. It was late October and the frost was glistening, but I
pulled off my boots in a moment and silently followed the fellow. Inside
the fence near Marjie's window was a big circle of lilac bushes,
transplanted years ago from the old Ohio home of the Whatelys. Inside
this clump Jean crept, and I knew by the quiet crackle of twigs and dead
leaves he was making his bed there. My first thought was to drag him out
and choke him. And then my better judgment prevailed. I slipped away to
find O'mie for a council.
"Phil, I'd like to kill him wid a hoe, same as Marjie did that other
rattlesnake that had Jim Conlow charmed an' flutterin' toward his pisen
fangs, only we'd better wait a bit. By Saint Patrick, Philip, we can't
hang up his hide yet awhoile. I know what the baste's up to annyhow."
"Well, what is it?" I queried eagerly.
"He's bein' a good Injun he is, an' he's got a crude sort o' notion he's
protectin' that dear little bird. She may be scared o' him, an' he knows
it; but bedad, I'd not want to be the border ruffian that went prowlin'
in there uninvited; would you?"
"Well, he's a dear trusty old Fido of a watchdog, O'mie. We will take
Father Le Claire's word, and keep an eye on him though. He will sleep
where he will sleep, but we'll see if the sight of water affects him
any. A dog of his breed may be subject to rabies. You can't always trust
even a 'good Injun.'"
After that I watched for Jean's coming and followed him to his lilac
bed, a half-savage, half-educated Indian brave, foolishly hoping to win
a white girl for his own.
All that Fall Jean never missed a night from the lilac bush. As long as
he persisted in passing the dark hours so near to the Whately home my
burden of anxiety and responsibility was doubled. In silent faithfulness
he kept sentinel watch. I dared not tell Marjie, for I knew it would
fill her nights with terror, and yet I feared her accidental discovery
of his presence. Jean was doing more than this, however. His promise to
be good seemed to belie Father Le Claire's warning. In and out of the
village all that winter he went, orderly, at times even affable, quietly
refusing every temptation to drunkenness. "A good Indian" he was, even
to the point where O'mie and I wondered if we might not have been wrong
in our judgment of him. He was growing handsomer too. He stood six feet
in his moccasins, stalwart as a giant, with grace in every motion.
Somehow he seemed more like a picturesque Gipsy, a sort of
semi-civilized grandee, than an Indian of the Plains. There was a
dominant courtliness in his manner and his bearing was kingly. People
spoke kindly of him. Regularly he took communion in the little Catholic
chapel at the south edge of town on the Kaw trail. Quietly but
persistently he was winning his way to universal favor. Only the Irish
lad and I kept our counsel and, waited.
After the bitterly cold New Year's Day of '63 the Indian forsook the
lilac bush for a time. But I knew he never lost track of Marjie's coming
and going. Every hour of the day or night he could have told just where
she was. We followed him down the river sometimes at night, and lost him
in the brush this side the Hermit's Cave. We did not know that this was
a mere trick to deceive us. To make sure of him we should have watched
the west prairie and gone up the river for his real landing place. How
he lived I do not know. An Indian can live on air and faith in a
promise, or hatred of a foe. At last he lulled even our suspicion to
sleep.
"Ask the priest what to do," I suggested to O'mie when we grew ashamed
of our spying. "They are together so much the rascal looks and walks
like him. See him on annuity day and tell him we feel like chicken
thieves and kidnappers."
O'mie obeyed me to the letter, and ended with the query to the good
Father:
"Now phwat should a couple of young sleuth-hounds do wid such a dacent
good Injun?"
Father Le Claire's reply stunned the Irish boy.
"He just drew himself up a mile high an' more," O'mie related to me,
"just stood up like the angel av the flamin' sword, an' his eyes blazed
a black, consumin' fire. 'Watch him,' says the praist, 'for God's sake,
watch him. Don't ask me again phwat to do. I've told you twice. Thirty
years have I lived and labored with his kind. I know them.' An' then,"
O'mie went on, "he put both arms around me an' held me close as me own
father might have done, somewhere back, an' turned an' left me. So
there's our orders. Will ye take 'em?"
I took them, but my mind was full of queries. I did not trust the
Indian, and yet I had no visible reason to doubt his sincerity.
CHAPTER VI
WHEN THE HEART BEATS YOUNG
A patch of green sod 'neath the trees brown and bare,
A smell of fresh mould on the mild southern air,
A twitter of bird song, a flutter, a call,
And though the clouds lower, and threaten and fall--
There's Spring in my heart!
--BERTA ALEXANDER GARVEY.
When the prairies blossomed again, and the Kansas springtime was in its
daintiest green, when a blur of pink was on the few young orchards in
the Neosho Valley, and the cottonwoods in the draws were putting forth
their glittering tender leaves--in that sweetest time of all the year, a
new joy came to me. Most girls married at sixteen in those days, and
were grandmothers at thirty-five. Marjie was no longer a child. No
sweeter blossom of young womanhood ever graced the West. All Springvale
loved her, except Lettie Conlow. And Cam Gentry summed it all up in his
own quaint way, brave old Cam fighting all the battles of the war over
again on the veranda of the Cambridge House, since his defective range
of vision kept him from the volunteer service. Watching Marjie coming
down the street one spring morning Cam declared solemnly:
"The War's done decided, an' the Union has won. A land that can grow
girls like Marjory Whately's got the favorin' smile of the Almighty upon
it."
For us that season all the world was gay and all the skies were
opal-hued, and we almost forgot sometimes that there could be sorrow and
darkness and danger. Most of all we forgot about an alien down in the
Hermit's Cave, "a good Indian" turned bad in one brief hour. Dear are
the memories of that springtide. Many a glorious April have I seen in
this land of sunshine, but none has ever seemed quite like that one to
me. Nor waving yellow wheat, nor purple alfalfa bloom, nor ramparts of
dark green corn on well-tilled land can hold for me one-half the beauty
of the windswept springtime prairie. No sweet odor of new-ploughed
ground can rival the fragrance of the wild grasses in their waving seas
of verdure.
We were coming home from Red Range late one April day, where we had gone
to a last-day-of-school affair. The boys and girls did not ride in a
group now, but broke up into twos and twos sauntering slowly homeward.
The tender pink and green of the landscape with the April sunset tinting
in the sky overhead, and all the far south and west stretching away into
limitless waves of misty green blending into the amethyst of the world's
far bound, gave setting for young hearts beating in tune with the year's
young beauty.
Tell Mapleson and Lettie had been with Marjie and me for a time, but at
last Tell had led Lettie far away. When we reached the draw beyond the
big cottonwood where Jean Pahusca threw us into such disorder on that
August evening the year before, we found a rank profusion of spring
blossoms. Leading our ponies by the bridle rein we lingered long in the
fragrant draw, gathering flowers and playing like two children among
them. At length Marjie sat down on the sloping ground and deftly wove
into a wreath the little pink blooms of some frail wild flower.
"Come, Phil," she cried, "come, crown me Queen of May here in April!"
I was as tall then as I am now, and Marjie at her full height came only
to my shoulder. I stooped to lay that dainty string of blossoms above
her brow. They fell into place in her wavy hair and nestled there,
making a picture only memory can keep. The air was very sweet and the
whole prairie about the little draw was still and dewy. The purple
twilight, shot through with sunset coloring, made an exquisite glory
overhead, and far beyond us. It is all sacred to me even now, this
moment in Love's young dream. I put both my hands gently against her
fair round cheeks and looked down her into her brown eyes.
"Oh, Marjie," I said softly, and kissed her red lips just once.
She said never a word while we stood for a moment, a moment we never
forgot. The day's last gleam of gold swept about us, and the ripple of a
bird's song in the draw beyond the bend fell upon the ear. An instant
later both ponies gave a sudden start. We caught their bridle reins, and
looked for the cause. Nothing was in sight.
"It must have been a rattlesnake in that tall grass, Phil," Marjie
exclaimed. "The ponies don't like snakes, and they don't care for
flowers."
"There are no snakes here, Marjie. This is the garden of Eden without
the Serpent," I said gayly.
All the homeward way was a dream of joy. We forgot there was a Civil
War; that this was a land of aching hearts and dreary homes, and
bloodshed and suffering and danger and hate. We were young, it was April
on the prairies, and we had kissed each other in the pink-wreathed
shadows of the twilight. Oh, it was good to live!
The next morning O'mie came grinning up the hill.
"Say, Phil, ye know I cut the chape Neosho crowd last evening up to Rid
Range fur that black-eyed little Irish girl they call Kathleen. So I
came home afterwhoile behind you, not carin' to contaminate meself wid
such a common set after me pleasant company at Rid Range."
"Well, we managed to pull through without you, O'mie, but don't let it
happen again. It's too hard on the girls to be deprived of your
presence. Do be more considerate of us, my lord."
O'mie grinned more broadly than ever.
"Well, I see a sight worth waitin' fur on my homeward jaunt in the
gloamin'."
"What was it, a rattlesnake?"
"Yes, begorra, it was just that, an' worse. You remember the draw this
side of the big cottonwood, the one where the 'good Injun' come at us
last August, the time he got knocked sober at the old tepee ring?"
I gave a start and my cheeks grew hot. O'mie pretended not to notice me.
"Well," he went on, "just as I came beyont that ring on this side and
dips down toward the draw where Jean come from when he was aimin' to
hang a certain curly brown-haired scalp--"
A thrill of horror went through me at the picture.
"Ye needn't shiver. Injuns do that; even little golden curls from
babies' heads. You an' me may live to see it, an' kill the Injun that
does it, yit. Now kape quiet. In this draw aforesaid, just like a rid
granite gravestone sat a rid granite Injun, 'a good Injun,' mind you. In
his hands was trailin' a broken wreath of pink blossoms, an' near as an
Injun can, an' a Frenchman can't, he was lovin' 'em fondly. My
appearance, unannounced by me footman, disconcerted him extramely. He
rose up an' he looked a mile tall. They moved some clouds over a little
fur his head up there," pointing toward the deep blue April sky where
white cumulus clouds were heaped, "an' his eyes was one blisterin'
grief, an' blazin' hate. He walks off proud an' erect, but some like a
wounded bird too. But mostly and importantly, remember, and renew your
watchfulness. It's hate an' a bad Injun now. Mark my words. The 'good
Injun' went out last night wid the witherin' of them pink flowers lyin'
limp in his cruel brown hands."
"But whose flower wreath could it have been?" I asked carelessly.
"O, phwat difference! Just some silly girl braided 'em up to look sweet
for some silly boy. An' maybe he kissed her fur it. I dunno. Annyhow she
lost this bauble, an' looking round I found it on the little knoll where
maybe she sat to do her flower wreathin'."
He held up an old-fashioned double silver scarf-pin, the two pins held
together by a short silver chain, such as shawls were fastened with in
those days. Marjie had had the pin in the light scarf she carried on her
arm. It must have slipped out when she laid the scarf beside her and sat
down to make the wreath. I took the pin from O'mie's hand, my mind clear
now as to what had frightened the ponies. A new anxiety grew up from
that moment. The "good Indian" was passing. And yet I was young and
joyously happy that day, and I did not feel the presence of danger then.
The early May rains following that April were such as we had never known
in Kansas before. The Neosho became bank-full; then it spread out over
the bottom lands, flooding the wooded valley, creeping up and up towards
the bluffs. It raced in a torrent now, and the song of its rippling over
stony ways was changed to the roar of many waters, rushing headlong down
the valley. On the south of us Fingal's Creek was impassable. Every
draw was brimming over, and the smaller streams became rivers. All these
streams found their way to the Neosho and gave it impetus to
destroy--which it did, tearing out great oaks and sending them swirling
and plunging, in its swiftest currents. It found the soft, uncertain
places underneath its burden of waters and with its millions of unseen
hands it digged and scooped and shaped the thing anew. When at last the
waters were all gone down toward the sea and our own beautiful river was
itself again, singing its happy song on sunny sands and in purple
shadows, the valley contour was much changed. To the boys who had known
it, foot by foot, the differences would have been most marked.
Especially would we have noted the change about the Hermit's Cave, had
not that Maytime brought its burden of strife to us all.
That was the black year of the Civil War, with Murfreesboro,
Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chattanooga and Chickamauga all on its
record. Here in Kansas the minor tragedies are lost in the great horror
of the Quantrill raid at Lawrence. But the constant menace of danger,
and the strain of the thousand ties binding us to those from every part
of the North who had gone out to battle, filled every day with its own
care. When the news of Chancellorsville reached us, Cam Gentry sat on
the tavern veranda and wept.
"An' to think of me, strong, an' able, an' longin' to fight for the
Union, shut out because I can only see so far."
"But Uncle Cam," Dr. Hemingway urged, "Stonewall Jackson was killed by
his own men just when victory was lost to us. You might do the same
thing,--kill some man the country needs. And I believe, too, you are
kept here for a purpose. Who knows how soon we may need strong men in
this town, men who can do the short-range work? The Lord can use us all,
and your place is here. Isn't that true, Brother Dodd?"
I was one of the group on the veranda steps that evening where the men
were gathered in eager discussion of the news of the great Union loss at
Chancellorsville, brought that afternoon by the stage from Topeka. I
glanced across at Dodd, pastor of the Methodist Church South. A small,
secretive, unsatisfactory man, he seemed to dole out the gospel
grudgingly always, and never to any outside his own denomination.
He made no reply and Dr. Hemingway went on: "We have Philip here, and
I'd count on him and his crowd against the worst set of outlaws that
ever rode across the border. Yet they need your head, Uncle Cam,
although their arms are strong."
He patted my shoulder kindly.
"We need you, too," he continued, "to keep us cheered up. When the Lord
says to some of us, 'So far shalt thou see, and no farther,' he may give
to that same brother the power to scatter sunshine far and wide. Oh, we
need you, Brother Gentry, to make us laugh if for nothing else."
Uncle Cam chuckled. He was built for chuckling, and we all laughed with
him, except Mr. Dodd. I caught a sneer on his face in the moment.
Presently Father Le Claire and Jean Pahusca joined the group. I had not
seen the latter since the day of O'mie's warning. Indian as he was, I
could see a change in his impassive face. It made me turn cold, me, to
whom fear was a stranger. Father Le Claire, too, was not like himself.
Self-possessed always, with his native French grace and his inward
spiritual calm, this evening he seemed to be holding himself by a
mighty grip, rather than by that habitual self-mastery that kept his
life in poise.
I tell these impressions as a man, and I analyze them as a man, but, boy
as I was, I felt them then with keenest power. Again the likeness of
Indian and priest possessed me, but raised no query within me. In form,
in gait and especially in the shape of the head and the black hair about
their square foreheads they were as like as father and son. Just once I
caught Jean's eye. The eye of a rattlesnake would have been more
friendly. O'mie was right. The "good Indian" had vanished. What had come
in his stead I was soon to know. But withal I could but admire the fine
physique of this giant.
While the men were still full of the Union disaster, two horsemen came
riding up to the tavern oak. Their horses were dripping wet. They had
come up the trail from the southwest, where the draws were barely
fordable. Strangers excited no comment in a town on the frontier. The
trail was always full of them coming and going. We hardly noted that for
ten days Springvale had not been without them.
"Come in, gentlemen," called Cam. "Here, Dollie, take care of these
friends. O'mie, take their horses."
They passed inside and the talk outside went eagerly on.
"Father Le Claire, how do the Injuns feel about this fracas now?"
inquired Tell Mapleson.
The priest spoke carefully.
"We always counsel peace. You know we do not belong to either faction."
His smile was irresistible, and the most partisan of us could not
dislike him that he spoke for neither North nor South.
"But," Tell persisted, "how do the Injuns themselves feel?"
Tell seemed to have lost his usual insight, else he could have seen that
quick, shrewd, penetrating glance of the good Father's reading him
through and through.
"I have just come from the Mission," he said. "The Osages are always
loyal to the Union. The Verdigris River was too high for me to hear from
the villages in the southwest."
Tell was listening eagerly. So also were the two strangers who stood in
the doorway now. If the priest noted this he gave no sign. Mr. Dodd
spoke here for the first time.
"Well," he said in his pious intonation, "if the Osages are loyal, that
clears Jean here. He's an Osage, isn't he?"
Jean made no reply; neither did Le Claire, and Tell Mapleson turned
casually to the strangers, engaging them in conversation.
"We shall want our horses at four sharp in the morning," one of the two
came out to say to Cam. "We have a long hard day before us."
"At your service," answered Cam. "O'mie, take the order in your head."
"Is that the biggest hostler you've got?" looking contemptuously at
little O'mie standing beside me. "If you Kansas folks weren't such
damned abolitionists you'd have some able-bodied niggers to do your work
right."
O'mie winked at me and gave a low whistle. Neither the wink nor the
whistle was lost on the speaker, who frowned darkly at the boy.
Cam squinted up at the men good-naturedly. "Them horses dangerous?" he
asked.
"Yes, they are," the stranger replied. "Can we have a room downstairs?
We want to go to bed early. We have had a hard day."
"You can begin to say your 'Now I lay me' right away in here if you
like," and the landlord led the way into a room off the veranda. One of
the two lingered outside in conversation with Mapleson for a brief time.
"Come, go home with me, O'mie," I said later, when the crowd began to
thin out.
"Not me," he responded. "Didn't ye hear, 'four A. M. sharp'? It's me
flat on me bed till the dewy morn an' three-thirty av it. Them's vicious
horses. An' they'll be to curry clane airly. Phil," he added in a lower
voice, "this town's a little overrun wid strangers wid no partic'lar
business av their own, an' we don't need 'em in ours. For one private
citizen, I don't like it. The biggest one of them two men in there's
named Yeager, an' he's been here three toimes lately, stayin' only a few
hours each toime."
O'mie looked so little to me this evening! I had hardly noted how the
other boys had outgrown him.
"You're not very big for a horseman after all, my son, but you're grit
clear through. You may do something yet the big fellows couldn't do," I
said affectionately.
He was Irish to the bone, and never could entirely master his brogue,
but we had no social caste lines, and Springvale took him at face value,
knowing his worth.
At Marjie's gate I stopped to make sure everything was all right.
Somehow when I knew the Indian was in town I could never feel safe for
her. She hurried out in response to my call.
"I'm so glad to see you to-night, Phil," she said, a little tremulously.
"I wish father were here. Do you think he is safe?"
She was leaning on the gate, looking eagerly into my eyes. The shadows
of the May twilight were deepening around us, and Marjie's white face
looked never so sweet to me as now, in her dependence on my assurance.
"I'm sure Mr. Whately is all right. It is the bad news that gets here
first. I'm so glad our folks weren't at Chancellorsville."
"But they may be in as dreadful a battle soon. Oh, Phil, I'm so--what?
lonesome and afraid to-night. I wish father could come home."
It was not like Marjie, who had been a dear brave girl, always cheering
her dependent mother and hopefully expecting the best. To-night there
swept over me anew that sense of the duty every man owes to the home. It
was an intense feeling then. Later it was branded with fire into my
consciousness. I put one of my big hands over her little white hand on
the gate.
"Marjie," I said gently, "I promised your father I would let no harm
come to you. Don't be afraid, little girl. You can trust me. Until he
comes back I will take care of you."
The twilight was sweet and dewy and still. About the house the shadows
were darkening. I opened the gate, and drawing her hand through my arm,
I went up the walk with her.
"Is that the lilac that is so fragrant?" I caught a faint perfume in the
air.
"Yes," sadly, "what there is of it." And then she laughed a little.
"That miserable O'mie came up here the day after we went to Red Range
and persuaded mother to cut it all down except one straight stick of a
bush. He told her it was dying, and that it needed pruning, and I don't
know what. And you know mother. I was over at the Anderson's, and when I
came home the whole clump was gone. I dreamed the other night that
somebody was hiding in there. It was all dead in the middle. Do you
remember when we played hide-and-seek in there?"
"I never forget anything you do, Marjie," I answered; "but I'm glad the
bushes are thinned out."
She broke off some plumes of the perfumy blossoms.
"Take those to Aunt Candace. Tell her I sent them. Don't let her think
you stole them," she was herself now, and her fear was gone.
"May I take something else to Aunt Candace, too, Marjie?"
"What else?" She looked up innocently into my face. We were at the
door-step now.
"A good-night kiss, Marjie."
"I'll see her myself about that," she replied mischievously but
confusedly, pushing me away. I knew her cheek was flushed as my own, and
I caught her hand and held it fast.
"Good-night, Phil." That sweet voice of hers I could not disobey. In a
moment I was gone, happy and young and confident. I could have fought
the whole Confederate army for the sake of this girl left in my care--my
very own guardianship.
CHAPTER VII
THE FORESHADOWING OF PERIL
O clear-eyed Faith, and Patience thou
So calm and strong!
Lend strength to weakness, teach us how
The sleepless eyes of God look through
This night of wrong!
--WHITTIER.
While these May days were slipping by, strange history was making itself
in Kansas. I marvel now, as I recall the slender bonds that stayed us
from destruction, that we ever dared to do our part in that
record-building day. And I rejoice that we did not know the whole peril
that menaced us through those uncertain hours, else we should have lost
all courage.
Father Le Claire held himself neutral to the North and the South, and
was sometimes distrusted by both factions in our town; but he went
serenely on his way, biding his time patiently. At sunrise on the
morning after O'mie had surprised Jean Pahusca with Marjie's wreath of
faded blossoms held caressingly in his brown hands, Le Claire met him in
the little chapel. What he confessed led the priest to take him at once
to the Osages farther down on the Neosho.
"I had hoped to persuade Jean to stay at the Mission," Le Claire said
afterwards. "He is the most intelligent one of his own tribe I have ever
known, and he could be invaluable to the Osages, but he would not stay
away from Springvale. And I thought it best to come back with him."
The good man did not say why he thought it best to keep Jean under his
guardianship. Few people in Springvale would have dreamed how dangerous
a foe we had in this superbly built, picturesque, handsome Indian.
In the early hours of the morning after his return, the priest was
roused from a sound sleep by O'mie. A storm had broken over the town
just after midnight. When it had spent itself and roared off down the
valley, the rain still fell in torrents, and O'mie's clothes were
dripping when he rushed into Le Claire's room.
"For the love av Heaven," he cried, "they's a plot so pizen I must git
out of me constitution quick. They're tellin' it up to Conlow's shop.
Them two strangers, Yeager and his pal, that's s'posed to be sleepin'
now to get an airly start, put out 'fore midnight for a prowl an' found
theirsilves right up to Conlow's. An' I wint along behind
'em--respectful," O'mie grinned; "an' there was Mapleson an' Conlow an'
the holy Dodd, mind ye. M. E. South's his rock o' defence. An' Jean was
there too. They're promisin' him somethin', the strangers air. Tell an'
Conlow seemed to kind o' dissent, but give in finally."
"Is it whiskey?" asked the priest.
"No, no. Tell says he can't have nothin' from the 'Last Chance.' Says
the old Roman Catholic'll fix his agency job at Washington if he lets
Jean get drunk. It's somethin' else; an' Tell wants to git aven with
you, so he gives in."
The priest's face grew pale.
"Well, go on."
"There's a lot of carrion birds up there I never see in this town. Just
lit in there somehow. But here's the schame. The Confederates has it
all planned, an' they're doin' it now to league together all the Injun
tribes av the Southwest. They's more 'n twinty commissioned officers,
Rebels, ivery son av 'em, now on their way to meet the chiefs av these
tribes. An' all the Kansas settlements down the river is to be fell upon
by the Ridskins, an' nobody to be spared. Wid them Missouri raiders on
the east and the Injuns in the southwest where'll anybody down there be,
begorra, betwixt two sich grindin' millstones? I couldn't gather it all
in, ye see. I was up on a ladder peeking in through a long hole laid
down sideways. But that's the main f'ature av the rumpus. They're
countin' big on the Osages becase the Gov'mint trusts 'em to do scout
duty down beyont Humboldt, and Jean says the Osages is sure to join 'em.
Said it is whispered round at the Mission now. And phwat's to be nixt?"
Father Le Claire listened intently to O'mie's hurried recital. Then he
rose up before the little Irishman, and taking both of the boy's hands
in his, he said: "O'mie, you must do your part now."
"Phwat can I do? Show me, an' bedad, I'll do it."
"You will keep this to yourself, because it would only make trouble if
it were repeated now, and we may outwit the whole scheme without any
unnecessary anxiety and fright. Also, you must keep your eyes and ears
open to all that's done and said here. Don't let anything escape you. If
I can get across the Neosho this morning I can reach the Mission in time
to keep the Osages from the plot, and maybe break it up. Then I'll come
back here. They might need me if Jean"--he did not finish the sentence.
"In two days I can do everything needful; while if the word were started
here now, it might lead to a Rebel uprising, and you would be
outnumbered by the Copperheads here, backed by the Fingal's Creek
crowd. You could do nothing in an open riot."
"I comprehend ye," said O'mie. "It's iverything into me eyes an' ears
an' nothin' out av me mouth."
"Meanwhile," the priest spoke affectionately, "you must be strong, my
son, to choose the better part. If it's life or death,--O God, that
human life should be held so cheap!--if it's left to you to choose who
must be the sacrifice, you will choose right. I can trust you. Remember,
in two or three days at most, I can be back; but keep your watch,
especially of Jean. He means mischief, but I cannot stay here now, much
less take him with me. He would not go."
So it happened that Father Le Claire hurried away in the darkness and
the driving rain, and at a fearful risk swam his horse across the
Neosho, and hastened with all speed to the Mission.
When that midnight storm broke over the town, on the night when O'mie
followed the strangers and found out their plot, I helped Aunt Candace
to fasten the windows and make sure against it until I was too wide
awake to go to bed. I sat down by my window, in the lightning flashes
watching the rain, wind-driven across the landscape. The night was pitch
black. In all the southwest there was only one light, a sullen red bar
of flame that came up from Conlow's forge fire. I watched it
indifferently at first because it was there. Then I began to wonder why
it should gleam there red and angry at this dead hour of darkness. As I
watched, the light flared up as though it were fanned into a blaze. Then
it began to blink and I knew some one was inside the shop. It was
blotted out for a time, then it glowed again, as if there were many
passing and re-passing. I wondered what it could all mean in such an
hour, on such a night as this. Then I thought of old Conlow's children,
of "Possum" in his weak, good-natured homeliness, and of Lettie. How I
disliked her, and wished she would keep out of my way, which she never
would do. Her face was clear to me, there in the dark. It grew
malicious; then it hardened into wickedness, and I slipped from watching
into a drowsy, half-waking sleep in my chair. The red bar of light
became the flame of cannon on a battlefield, I saw our men in a
life-and-death struggle with the enemy on a rough, wild mountainside.
Everywhere my father was leading them on, and by his side Irving Whately
bore the Springvale flag aloft. And then beside me lay the color-bearer
with white, agonized face, pleading with me. His words were ringing in
my ears, "Take care of Marjie, Phil; keep her from harm."
I woke with a start, stiff and shivering. With one half-dazed glance at
the black night and that sullen tell-tale light below me, I groped my
way to my bed and slept then the dreamless sleep of vigorous youth.
The rain continued for many hours. Yeager and his company could not get
away from town on account of the booming Neosho. Also several other
strange men seemed to have rained down from nobody asked where, and
while the surface of affairs was smooth there was a troubled
undercurrent. Nobody seemed to know just what to expect, yet a sense of
calamity pervaded the air. Meanwhile the rain poured down in
intermittent torrents. On the second evening of this miserable gloom I
strolled down to the tavern stables to find O'mie. Bud and John Anderson
and both the Mead boys were there, sprawled out on the hay. O'mie sat on
a keg in the wagon way, and they were all discussing affairs of State
like sages. I joined in and we fought the Civil War to a finish in half
an hour. In all the "solid North" there was no more loyal company on
that May night than that group of brawny young fellows full of the fire
of patriotism, who swore anew their eternal allegiance to the Union.
"It's a crime and a disgrace," declared Dave Mead, "that because we're
only boys we can't go to the War, and every one of us, except O'mie
here, muscled like oxen; while older, weaker men are being shot down at
Chancellorsville or staggering away from Bull Run."
"O'mie 'thgot the thtuff in him though. I'd back him againth David and
Goliath," Bud Anderson insisted.
"Yes, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or some other Bible characters," observed
Bill Mead. "You'd better join the Methodist Church South, Bud, and let
old Dodd labor with you."
Then O'mie spoke gravely:
"Boys, we've got a civil war now in our middust. Don't ask me how I
know. The feller that clanes the horses around the tavern stables, trust
him fur findin' which way the Neosho runs, aven if he is small an'
insignificant av statoor. I've seen an' heard too much in these two
dirty wet days."
He paused, and there came into his eyes a pathetic pleading look as of
one who sought protection. It gave place instantly to a fearless, heroic
expression that has been my inspiration in many a struggle. I know now
how he longed to tell us all he knew, but his word to Le Claire held him
back.
"I can't tell you exactly phwat's in the air, fur I don't know it all
yit. But there's trouble brewin' here, an' we must be ready, as we
promised we would be when our own wint to the front."
O'mie had hit home. Had we not sworn our fealty to the flag, and
protection to our town in our boyish patriotism the Summer before?
"Boys," O'mie went on, "if the storm breaks here in Springvale we've got
to forgit ourselves an' ivery son av us be a hero for the work that's
laid before him. Safe or dangerous, it's duty we must be doin', like the
true sons av a glorious commonwealth, an' we may need to be lightnin'
swift about it, too."
Tell Mapleson and Jim Conlow had come in as O'mie was speaking. We knew
their fathers were bitter Rebels, although the men made a pretence to
loyalty, which kept them in good company. But somehow the boys had not
broken away from young Tell and Jim. From childhood we had been
playmates, and boyish ties are strong. This evening the two seemed to be
burdened with something of which they dared not or would not speak.
There was a sort of defiance about them, such as an enemy may assume
toward one who has been his friend, but whom he means to harm. Was it
the will of Providence made O'mie appeal to them at the right moment?
"Say, boys," he had a certain Celtic geniality, and a frank winning
smile that was irresistible. "Say, boys, all av the crowd's goin' to
stand together no matter what comes, just as we've done since we learned
how to swim in the shallows down by the Deep Hole. We're goin' to stand
shoulder to shoulder, an' we'll save this town from harm, whativer may
come in betwane, an' whoiver av us it's laid on to suffer, in the ind
we'll win. For why? We are on the right side, an' can count on the same
Power that's carried men aven to the inds av the earth to fight an' die
fur what's right. Will ye be av us, boys? We've niver had no split in
our gang yet. Will ye stay wid us?"
Tell and Jim looked at each other. Then Tell spoke. He had the right
stuff in him at the last test always.
"Yes, boys, we will, come what will come."
Jim grinned at Tell. "I'll stand by Tell, if it kills me," he declared.
We put little trust in his ability. It is the way of the world to
overlook the stone the Master Builder sometimes finds useful for His
purpose.
"An' you may need us real soon, too," Tell called back as the two went
out.
"By cracky, I bet they know more 'n we do," Bud Anderson declared.
Dave Mead looked serious.
"Well, I believe they'll hold with us anyhow," he said. "What they know
may help us yet."
The coming of another tremendous downpour sent us scampering homeward.
O'mie and I had started up the hill together, but the underside of the
clouds fell out just as we reached Judson's gate, and by the time we had
come to Mrs. Whately's we were ready to dive inside for shelter. When
the rain settled down for an all-night stay, Mrs. Whately would wrap us
against it before we left her. She put an old coat of Mr. Whately's on
me. I had gone out in my shirt sleeves. Marjie looked bravely up at my
tall form. I knew she was thinking of him who had worn that coat. The
only thing for O'mie was Marjie's big water proof cloak. The
old-fashioned black-and-silver mix with the glistening black buttons,
such as women wore much in those days. It had a hood effect, with a
changeable red silk lining, fastened at the neck. To my surprise O'mie
made no objection at all to wearing a girl's wrap. But I could never
fully forecast the Irish boy. He drew the circular garment round him
and pulled the hood over his head.
"Come, Philip, me strong protector," he called, "let's be skiting."
At the door he turned back to Marjie and said in a low voice, "Phil will
mistake me fur a girl an' be wantin' me to go flower-huntin' out on the
West Prairie, but I won't do it."
Marjie blushed like the June roses, and slammed the door after him. A
moment later she opened it again and held the light to show us the
dripping path to the gate. Framed in the doorway with the light held up
by her round white arm, the dampness putting a softer curl in every
stray lock of her rich brown hair, the roses still blooming on her
cheeks, she sent us away. Too young and sweet-spirited she seemed for
any evil to assail her in the shelter of that home.
Late at night again the red light of the forge was crossed and re-crossed
by those who moved about inside the shop. Aunt Candace and I had sat
long together talking of the War, and of the raiding on the Kansas
border. She was a balm to my spirit, for she was a strong, fearless
woman, always comforting in the hour of sorrow, and self-possessed in
the face of danger. I wonder how the mothers of Springvale could have
done without her. She decked the brides for their weddings, and tenderly
laid out the dead. The new-born babe she held in her arms, and dying
eyes looking back from the Valley of the Shadow, sought her face. That
night I slept little, and I welcomed the coming of day. When the morning
dawned the world was flooded with sunshine, and a cool steady west wind
blew the town clear of mud and wet, the while the Neosho Valley was
threshed with the swollen, angry waters.
With the coming of the sunshine the strangers disappeared. Nowhere all
that day were there any but our own town's people to be seen. Some of
these, however, I knew afterwards, were very busy. I remember seeing
Conlow and Mapleson and Dodd sauntering carelessly about in different
parts of the town, especially upon Cliff Street, which was unusual for
them. Just at nightfall the town was filled with strangers again. Yeager
and his companion, who had been water-bound, returned with half a dozen
more to the Cambridge House, and other unknown men were washed in from
the west. That night I saw the red light briefly. Then it disappeared,
and I judged the shop was deserted. I did not dream whose head was
shutting off the light from me, nor whose eyes were peering in through
that crevice in the wall. The night was peacefully beautiful, but its
beauty was a mockery to me, filled as I was with a nameless anxiety. I
had no reason for it, yet I longed for the return of Father Le Claire.
He had not taken Jean with him, and I judged that the Indian was near us
somewhere and in the very storm centre of all this uneasiness.
At midnight I wakened suddenly. Outside, a black starless sky bent over
a cool, quiet earth. A thick darkness hid all the world. Dead stillness
everywhere. And yet, I listened for a voice to speak again that I was
sure I had heard as I wakened. I waited only a moment. A quick rapping
under my window, and a low eager call came to my ears. I sprang up and
groped my way to the open casement.
"What's the matter down there?" I called softly.
"Phil, jump into your clothes and come down just as quick as you can."
It was Tell Mapleson's voice, full of suppressed eagerness. "For God's
sake, hurry. It's life and death. Hurry! Hurry!"
"Run to the side door, Tell, and call Aunt Candace. She'll let you in."
I heard him make a plunge for the side door. By the time my aunt wakened
to open it, I was down stairs. Tell stood inside the hallway, white and
haggard. Our house was like a stone fort in its security, and Aunt
Candace had fastened the door behind him. She seemed a perfect tower of
strength to me, standing there like a strong guardian of the home.
"Stop a minute, Tell. We'll save time by knowing what we are about.
What's the matter?" My aunt's voice gave him self-control.
He held himself by a great effort.
"There's not a second to lose, but we can't do anything without Phil. He
must lead us. There's been a plot worked up here for three nights in
Conlow's shop, to burn' every Union man's house in town. Preacher Dodd
and that stranger named Yeager and the other fellow that's been stayin'
at the tavern are backin' the whole thing. The men that's been hanging
round here are all in the plot. They're to lay low a little while, and
at two o'clock the blazin's to begin. Jim's run to Anderson's and
Mead's, but we'll do just what Phil says. We'll get the boys together
and you'll tell us what to do. The men'll kill Jim an' me if they find
out we told, but we swore we'd stay by you boys. We'll help clear
through, but don't tell on us. Don't never tell who told on 'em. Please
don't." Tell never had seemed manly to me till that moment. "They're
awful against O'mie. They say he knows too much. He heard 'em talking
too free round the stables. They're after you too, Phil. They think if
they get you out of the way, they can manage all the rest. I heard old
Dodd tell 'em to make sure of John Baronet's cub. Said you were the
worst in town, to come against. They'll kill you if they lay hands on
you. They'll come right here after you."
"Then they'll go back without him," my aunt said firmly.
"They say the Indians are to come from the south at daylight," Tell
hurried on, "an' finish up all that's left without homes. They're the
Kiowas. They'll not get here till just about daylight." Tell's teeth
were chattering, and he trembled as with an ague.
"Worst of all,"--he choked now,--"Whately's home's to be left alone, and
Jean's to get Marjie and carry her off. They hate her father so, they've
let Jean have her. They know she was called over to Judson's late to
stay with Mrs. Judson. He's away, water-bound, and the baby's sick, and
just as she gets home, he's to get her. If she screams, or tries to get
away, he'll scalp her."
I heard no more. My heart forgot to beat. I had seen Marjie's signal
light at ten o'clock and I was sure of her safety. The candle turned
black before me. The cry of my dreams, Irving Whately's pleading cry,
rang in my ears: "Take care of Marjie, Phil! Keep her from harm!"
"Phil Baronet, you coward," Tell fairly hissed in my ear, "come and help
us! We can't do a thing without you."
I, a coward! I sprang to the door and with Tell beside me we sped away
in the darkness. A faint light glimmered in the Whately home. At the
gate, Dave Mead hailed us.
"It's too late, boys," he whispered, "Jean's gone and she's with him.
He rode by me like the devil, going toward the ford. They'll be drowned
and that's better than for her to live. The whole Indian Territory may
be here by morning."
I lifted my face to the pitiless black sky above me, and a groan, the
agony of a breaking heart, burst from my lips. In that instant, I lived
ages of misery.
"Oh, Phil, what shall we do? The town's full of helpless folks." Dave
caught my arm to steady himself. "Can't you, can't you put us to work?"
Could I? His appeal brought me to myself. In the right moment the Lord
sends us to our places, and forsakes us not until our task is finished.
On me that night, was laid the duty of leadership in a great crisis; and
He who had called me, gave me power. Every Union household in the town
must be roused and warned of the impending danger. And whatever was done
must be done quickly, noiselessly, and at a risk of life to him who did
it. My plan sprang into being, and Dave and Tell ran to execute it. In a
few minutes we were to meet under the tavern oak. I dashed off toward
the Cambridge House. Uncle Cam had not yet gone to bed.
"Where's O'mie?" I gasped.
"I dunno. He flew in here ten minutes or more ago, but he never lit. In
ten seconds he was out again an' gone. He's got some sense an' generally
keeps his red head level. I'm waitin' to see what's up."
In a word I gave Cam the situation, all except Jean's part. As I hurried
out to meet the boys at the oak, I stumbled against something in the
dense darkness. Cam hastened after me. The flare of the light from the
opening of the door showed a horse, wet and muddy to the throat latch.
It stared at the light in fright and then dashed away in the darkness.
All the boys, Tell and Jim, the Meads, John, Clayton, and Bud
Anderson,--all but O'mie, met in the deep shadow of the oak before the
tavern door. Our plans fell into form with Cam's wiser head to shape
them here and there. The town was districted and each of us took his
portion. In the time that followed, I worked noiselessly, heroically,
taking the most dangerous places for my part. The boys rallied under my
leadership, for they would have it so. Everywhere they depended on my
word to direct them, and they followed my direction to the letter. It
was not I, in myself, but John Baronet's son on whom they relied. My
father's strength and courage and counsel they sought for in me. But all
the time I felt myself to be like a spirit on the edge of doom. I worked
as one who feels that when his task is ended, the blank must begin. Yet
I left nothing undone because of the dead weight on my soul.
What happened in that hour, can never all be told. And only God himself
could have directed us among our enemies. Since then I have always felt
that the purpose crowns the effort. In Springvale that night was a band
of resolute lawless men, organized and armed, with every foot of their
way mapped out, every name checked, the lintel of every Union doorway
marked, men ready and sworn to do a work of fire and slaughter. Against
them was a group of undisciplined boys, unorganized, surprised, and
unequipped, groping in the darkness full of unseen enemies. But we were
the home-guard, and our own lives were nothing to us, if only we could
save the defenceless.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COST OF SAFETY
In the dark and trying hour,
In the breaking forth of power,
In the rush of steeds and men,
His right hand will shield thee then.
--LONGFELLOW.
It was just half past one o'clock when the sweet-toned bell in the
Presbyterian Church steeple began to ring. Dr. Hemingway was at the rope
in the belfry. His part was to give us our signal. At the first peal the
windows of every Union home blazed with light. The doors were flung wide
open, and a song--one song--rose on the cool still night.
O say, can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?--
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming!
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
It was sung in strong, clear tones as I shall never hear it sung again;
and the echoes of many voices, and the swelling music of that old church
bell, floated down the Neosho Valley, mingling with the rushing of the
turbulent waters.
It was Cam Gentry's plan, this weapon of light and song. The Lord did
have a work for him to do, as Dr. Hemingway had said.
"Boys," he had counselled us under the oak, "we can't match 'em in a
pitched battle. They're armed an' ready, and you ain't and you can't do
nothing in the dark. But let every house be ready, just as Phil has
planned. Warn them quietly, and when the church bell rings, let every
winder be full of light, every door wide open, and everybody sing."
He could roar bass himself to be heard across the State line, and that
night he fairly boomed with song.
"They're dirty cowards, and can't work only in the dark and secret
quiet. Give 'em light and song. Let 'em know we are wide awake and not
afraid, an' if Gideon ever had the Midianites on the hike, you'll have
them pisen Copperheads goin'. They'll never dast to show a coil, the
sarpents! cause that's not the way they fight; an' they'll be wholly
onprepared, and surprised."
Just before the ringing of the signal bell, the boys had met again by
appointment under the tavern oak. Two things we had agreed upon when we
met there first. One was a pledge of secrecy as to the part of young
Tell and Jim in our work and to the part of Mapleson and Conlow in the
plot, for the sake of their boys, who were loyal to the town. The other
was to say nothing of Jean's act. Marjie was the light of Springvale,
and we knew what the news would mean. We must first save the homes,
quietly and swiftly. Other calamities would follow fast enough. In the
darkness now, Bud Anderson put both arms around me.
"Phil," he whispered, "you're my king. You muth go to her mother now. In
the morning, your Aunt Candathe will come to her. Maybe in the daylight
we can find Marjie. He can't get far, unleth the river--"
He held me tight in his arms, that manly, tender-hearted boy. Then I
staggered away like one in a dream toward the Whately house. We had not
yet warned Mrs. Whately, for we knew her home was to be spared, and our
hands were full of what must be done on the instant. Time never seemed
so precious to me as in those dreadful minutes when we roused that
sleeping town. I know now how Paul Revere felt when he rode to
Lexington.
But now my cold knuckles fell like lead against Mrs. Whately's door, and
mechanically I gave the low signal whistle I had been wont to give to
Marjie. Like a mockery came the clear trill from within. But there was
no mockery in the quick opening of the casement above me, where a dim
light now gleamed, nor in the flinging up of the curtain, and it was not
a spirit but a real face with a crown of curly hair that was outlined in
the gloom. And a voice, Marjie's sweet voice, called anxiously:
"Is that you, Phil? I'll be right down." Then the light disappeared, and
I heard the patter of feet on the stairs; then the front door opened and
I walked straight into heaven. For there stood Marjie, safe and strong,
before me--my Marjie, escaped from the grave, or from that living hell
that is worse than death, captivity in the hands of an Indian devil.
"What's the matter, Phil?"
"Marjie, can it be you? How did you ever get back?"
She looked at me wonderingly.
"Why, I was only down there at Judson's. The baby's sick and Mrs. Judson
sent for me after ten o'clock. I didn't come away till midnight. She may
send for me again at any minute,--that's why I'm not in bed. I wanted to
stay with her, but she made me come home on mother's account. I ran home
by myself. I wasn't afraid. I heard a horse galloping away just before
I got up to the gate. But what is the matter, Phil?"
I stood there wholly sure now that I was in Paradise. Jean had not tried
to get her after all. She was here, and no harm had touched her. Tell
had not understood. Jean had been in the middle of this night's business
somewhere, I felt sure, but he had done no one any harm. After all he
had been true to his promise to be a good Indian, and Le Claire had
misjudged him.
"You didn't see who was on the horse, did you?"
"No. Just as I started from Mrs. Judson's, O'mie came flying by me. He
looked so funny. He had on the waterproof cloak I loaned him last night,
hood and all, and his face was just as white as milk. I thought he was a
girl at first. He called to me almost in a whisper. 'Don't hurry a bit,
Marjie,' he said; 'I'm taking your cloak home.' But I couldn't find it
anywhere about the door. O'mie is always doing the oddest things!"
Just then the church bell began to ring, and together we put on the
lights and joined in the song. Its inspiration drove everything before
it. I did not stay long with Marjie, however, for there was much for me
to do, and I seemed to have stepped from a world of horror and darkness
into a heaven of light. How I wished O'mie would come in! I had not
found him in all that hour, ages long to us, in which we had done this
much of our work for the town. But I was sure of O'mie.
"He's doing good business somewhere," I said. "Bless his red head. He'll
never quit so long as there's a thing to do."
There was no rest for anybody in Springvale that night. As Cam Gentry
had predicted, not a torch blazed; and the attacking party, thrown into
confusion by the sudden blocking of their secret plan of assault, did
not rally. Our next task was to make sure against the Indians, the
rumor of whose coming grew everywhere, and the fear of a daybreak
massacre kept us all keyed to the pitch of terrible expectancy.
The town had four strongholds, the tavern, the Whately store, the
Presbyterian Church, and my father's house. All these buildings were of
stone, with walls of unusual thickness. Into these the women and
children were gathered as soon as we felt sure the enemy in our midst
was outdone. Dr. Hemingway took command of the church. Cam Gentry at his
own door was a host.
"I can see who goes in and out of the Cambridge House; I reckon, if I
can't tell a Reb from a Bluecoat out in a battle," he declared, as he
opened his doors to the first little group of mothers and children who
came to him for protection. "I can see safety for every one of you
here," he added with that cheery laugh that made us all love him. Aunt
Candace was the strong guardian in our home up on Cliff Street. We
looked for O'mie to take care of the store, but he was nowhere to be
seen and that duty was given to Grandpa Mead, whose fiery Union spirit
did not accord with his halting step and snowy hair.
A patrol guard was quickly formed, and sentinels were stationed on the
south and west. On the north and east the flooded Neosho was a perfect
wall of water round about us.
Since that Maytime, I have lived through many days of peril and
suffering, and I have more than once walked bravely as I might along the
path at whose end I knew was an open grave, but never to me has come
another such night of terror. In all the town there were not a dozen
men, loyal supporters of the Union cause, who had a fighting strength.
On the eight stalwart boys, and the quickness and shrewdness of little
O'mie, the salvation of Springvale rested. After that awful night I was
never a boy again. Henceforth I was a man, with a man's work and a man's
spirit.
The daylight was never so welcome before, and never a grander sunrise
filled the earth with its splendor. I was up on the bluff patrolling the
northwest boundary when the dawn began to purple the east. Oh, many a
time have I watched the sunrise beyond the Neosho Valley, but on this
rare May morning every shaft of light, every tint of roseate beauty
along the horizon, every heap of feathery mist that decked the Plains,
with the Neosho, bank-full, sweeping like molten silver below it--all
these took on a new loveliness. Eagerly, however, I scanned the
southwest where the level beams of day were driving back the gray
morning twilight, and the green prairie billows were swelling out of the
gloom. Point by point, I watched every landmark take form, waiting to
see if each new blot on the landscape might not be the first of the
dreaded Indian bands whose coming we so feared.
With daybreak, came assurance. Somehow I could not believe that a land
so beautiful and a village so peaceful could be threshed and stained and
blackened by the fire and massacre of a savage band allied to a
disloyal, rebellious host. And yet, I had lived these stormy years in
Kansas and the border strife has never all been told. I dared not relax
my vigilance, so I watched the south and west, trusting to the river to
take care of the east.
And so it happened that, sentinel as I was, I had not seen the approach
of a horseman from the northwest, until Father Le Claire came upon me
suddenly. His horse was jaded with travel, and he sat it wearily. A
pallor overspread his brown cheeks. His garments were wet and
mud-splashed.
"Oh, Father Le Claire," I cried, "nobody except my own father could be
more welcome. Where have you been?"
"I am not too late, then!" he exclaimed, ignoring my question. His eyes
quickly took in the town. No smoke was rising from the kitchen fires
this morning, for the homes were deserted. "You are safe still?" He gave
a great gasp of relief. Then he turned and looked steadily into my eyes.
"It has been bought with a price," he said simply. "Three days ago I
left you a boy. I come back to find you a man. Where's O'mie?"
"D--down there, I think."
It dawned on me suddenly that not one of us had seen or heard of O'mie
since he left Tell and Jim at the shop just before midnight. Marjie had
seen him a few minutes later, and so had Cam Gentry. But where was he
after that? Much as we had needed him, we had had no time to hunt for
him. Places had to be filled by those at hand in the dreadful necessity
before us. We could count on O'mie, of course. He was no coward, nor
laggard; but where could he have kept himself?
"What has happened, Philip?" the priest asked.
Briefly I told him, ending with the story of the threatening terror of
an Indian invasion.
"They will not come, Philip. Do not fear. That danger is cut off. The
Kiowas, who were on their way to Springvale, have all turned back and
they are far away. I know."
His assurance was balm to my soul. And my nerves, on the rack for these
three days, with the culmination of the last six hours seemed suddenly
to snap within me.
"Go home and rest now," said Father Le Claire. "I will take the word
along the line. Come down to the tavern at nine o'clock."
Aunt Candace had hot coffee and biscuit and maple syrup from old
Vermont, with ham and eggs, all ready for me. The blessed comfort of a
home, safe from harm once more, filled me with a sense of rest. Not
until it was lifted did I realize how heavy was the burden I had carried
through those May nights and days.
Long before nine o'clock, the tavern yard was full of excited people,
all eagerly talking of the events of the last few hours. We had hardly
taken our bearings yet, but we had an assurance that the perils of the
night no longer threatened us. The strange men who had filled the town
the evening before had all disappeared, but in the company here were
many whom we knew to be enemies in the dark. Yet they mingled boldly
with the others, assuming a loyalty for their own purposes. In the
crowd, too, was Jean Pahusca, impenetrable of countenance, indifferent
to the occasion as a thing that could not concern him. His red blanket
was gone and his leather trousers and dark flannel shirt displayed his
superb muscular form. There was no knife in his belt now, and he carried
no other weapon. With his soft dark hair and the ruddy color showing in
his cheeks, he was dangerously handsome to a romantic eye. Among all its
enemies, he had been loyal to Springvale. My better self rebuked my
distrust, and my heart softened toward him. His plan with the raiders to
seize Marjie must have been his crude notion of saving her from a worse
peril. When he knew she was safe he had dropped out of sight in the
darkness.
The boys who had done the work of the night before suddenly became
heroes. Not all of us had come together here, however. Tell was keeping
store up at the "Last Chance," and Jim was seeing to the forge fire,
while the father of each boy sauntered about in the tavern yard.
"You won't tell anybody about father," Tell pleaded before he left us.
"He never planned it, indeed he didn't. It was old man Dodd and Yeager
and them other strangers."
I can picture now the Reverend Mr. Dodd, piously serious, sitting on the
tavern veranda at that moment, a disinterested listener to what lay
below his spiritual plane of life. Just above his temple was a deep
bruise, and his right hand was bound with a white bandage. Five years
later, one dark September night, by the dry bed of the Arickaree Creek
in Colorado, I heard the story of that bandage and that bruise.
"And you'll be sure to keep still about my dad, too, won't you?" Jim
Conlow urged. "He's bad, but--" as if he could find no other excuse, he
added grinning, "I don't believe he's right bright; and Tell and me done
our best anyhow."
Their best! These two had braved the worst of foes, with those of their
own flesh and blood against them. We would keep their secret fast
enough, nor should anyone know from the boys who of our own townspeople
were in the plot. I believe now that Conlow would have killed Jim had he
suspected the boy's part in that night's work. I have never broken faith
with Jim, although Heaven knows I have had cause enough to wish never to
hear the name of Conlow again.
One more boy was not in our line, O'mie, still missing from the ranks,
and now my heart was heavy. Everybody else seemed to forget him in the
excitement, however, and I hoped all was well.
On the veranda a group was crowding about Father Le Claire, listening to
what he had to say. Nobody tried to do business in our town that day.
Men and women and children stood about in groups, glad to be alive and
to know that their homes were safe. It was a sight one may not see
twice in a lifetime. And the thrill within me, that I had helped a
little toward this safety, brought a pleasure unlike any other joy I
have ever known.
"Where's Aunt Candace?" I asked Dollie Gentry, who had grasped my arm as
if she would ring it from my shoulder.
"Hadn't you heard?" Dollie's eyes filled with tears. "Judson's baby died
this mornin'. Judson he can't get across Fingal's Creek or some of the
draws, to get home, and the fright last night was too much for Mis'
Judson. She fainted away, an' when she come to, the baby was dead. I'm
cookin' a good meal for all of 'em. Land knows, carin' for the little
corpse is all they can do without botherin' to cook."
Good Mrs. Gentry used her one talent for everybody's comfort. And as for
the Judsons, theirs was one of the wayside tragedies that keep ever
alongside the line of civil strife.
They made room for us on the veranda, six husky Kansas bred fellows,
hardly more than half-way through our teens, and we fell in with the
group about Father Le Claire. He gave us a searching glance, and his
face clouded. Good Dr. Hemingway beside him was eager for his story.
"Tell us the whole thing," he urged. "Then we can understand our part in
it. Surely the arm of the Lord was not shortened for us last night."
"It is a strange story, Dr. Hemingway, with a strange and tragic
ending," replied the priest. He related then the plot which O'mie had
heard set forth by the strangers in our town. "I left at once to warn
the Osages, believing I could return before last night."
"Them Osages is a cussed ornery lot, if that Jean out on the edge of
the crowd there is a sample," a man from the west side of town broke in.
"They are true blue, and Jean is not an Osage; he's a Kiowa," Le Claire
replied quietly.
"What of him ain't French," declared Cam Gentry. "That's where his
durned meanness comes in biggest. Not but what a Kiowa's rotten enough.
But sence he didn't seem to take part in this doings last night, I guess
we can stand him a little while longer."
Father Le Claire's face flushed. Then a pallor overspread the flame.
His likeness to the Indian flashed up with that flush. So had I seen
Pahusca flush with anger, and a paleness cover his coppery countenance.
Self-mastery was a part of the good man's religion, however, and in a
voice calm but full of sympathy he told us of the tragic events whose
evil promise had overshadowed our town with an awful peril.
It was a well-planned, cold-blooded horror, this scheme of the Southern
Confederacy, to unite the fierce tribes of the Southwest against the
unprotected Union frontier. And with the border raiders on the one side
and the hostile Indians on the other, small chance of life would have
been left to any Union man, woman, or child in all this wide, beautiful
Kansas. In the four years of the Civil War no cruelty could have
exceeded the consequences of this conspiracy.
Unity of purpose has ever been lacking to the red race. No federation
has been possible to it except as that federation is controlled by the
European brain. The controlling power in the execution of this dastardly
crime lay with desperate but eminently able white men. Their appeal to
the Osages, however, was a fruitless one. For a third of a century the
faithful Jesuits had labored with this tribe. Not in vain was their
seed-sowing.
Le Claire reached the Osages only an hour before an emissary from the
leaders of this infamous plot came to the Mission. The presence of the
priest counted so mightily, that this call to an Indian confederacy fell
upon deaf ears, and the messenger departed to rejoin his superiors. He
never found them, for a sudden and tragic ending had come to the
conspiracy.
It was a busy day in Kansas annals when that company of Rebel officers
came riding up from the South to band together the lawless savages and
the outlawed raiders against a loyal commonwealth. Humboldt was the most
southern Union garrison in Kansas at that time. South of it the Osages
did much scout duty for the Government, and it held them responsible for
any invasion of this strip of neutral soil between the North and the
South. Out in the Verdigris River country, in this Maytime, a little
company of Osage braves on the way from their village to visit the
Mission came face to face with this band of invaders in the neutral
land. The presence of a score of strange men armed and mounted, though
they were dressed as Union soldiers, must be accounted for, these
Indians reasoned.
The scouts were moved only by an unlettered loyalty to the flag. They
had no notion of the real purpose of these invaders. The white men had
only contempt for the authority of a handful of red men calling them to
account, and they foolishly fired into the Indian band. It was a fatal
foolishness. Two braves fell to the earth, pierced by their bullets. The
little body of red men dropped over on the sides of their ponies and
were soon beyond gun range, while their opponents went on their way. But
briefly only, for, reinforced by a hundred painted braves, the whole
fighting strength of their little village, the Osages came out for
vengeance. Near a bend in the Verdigris River the two forces came
together. Across a scope five miles wide they battled. The white men
must have died bravely, for they fought stubbornly, foot by foot, as the
Indians drove them into that fatal loop of the river. It is deep and
swift here. Down on the sands by its very edge they fell. Not a white
man escaped. The Indians, after their savage fashion, gathered the
booty, leaving a score of naked, mutilated bodies by the river's side.
It was a cruel bit of Western warfare, yet it held back from Kansas a
diabolical outrage, whose suffering and horror only those who know the
Southwest tribes can picture. And strangely enough, the power that
stayed the evil lay with a handful of faithful Indian scouts.
The story of the massacre soon reached the Mission. Dreadful as it was,
it lifted a burden from Le Claire's mind; but the news that the
Comanches and the Kiowas, unable to restrain their tribes, were already
on the war-path, filed him with dread.
A twenty-four hours' rain, with cloudbursts along the way, was now
sending the Neosho and Verdigris Rivers miles wide, across their
valleys. It was impossible for him to intercept these tribes until the
stream should fall. The priest perfected his plans for overtaking them
by swift messengers to be sent out from the Mission at the earliest
moment, and then he turned his horse upstream toward Springvale. All day
he rode with all speed to the northward. The ways were sodden with the
heavy rains, and the smaller streams were troublesome to the horseman.
Night fell long before he had come to the upper Neosho Valley. With the
darkness his anxiety deepened. A thousand chances might befall to bring
disaster before he could reach us.
The hours of the black night dragged on, and northward still the priest
hurried. It was long after midnight when he found himself on the bluff
opposite the town. Between him and Springvale the Neosho rushed madly,
and the oak grove of the bottom land was only black treetops above, and
water below. All hope of a safe passage across the river here vanished,
for he durst not try the angry waters.
"There must have been heavier rains here than down the stream," he
thought. "Pray Heaven the messengers may reach the Kiowas before they
fall upon any of the settlements in the south. I must go farther up to
cross. O God, grant that no evil may threaten that town over there!"
Turning to look once more at the dark valley his eye caught a gleam of
light far down the river.
"That must be Jean down at the Hermit's Hole," he said to himself. "I
wonder I never tried to follow him there. But if he's down the river it
is better for Springvale, anyhow."
All this the priest told to the eager crowd on the veranda of the
Cambridge House that morning. But regarding the light and his thought of
it, he did not tell us then, nor how, through all and all, his great
fear for Springvale was on account of Jean Pahusca's presence there. He
knew the Indian's power; and now that the fierce passion of love for a
girl and hatred of a rival, were at fever pitch, he dared not think what
might follow, neither did he tell us how bitterly he was upbraiding
himself for having charged O'mie with secrecy.
He had not yet caught sight of the Irish boy; and Jean, who had himself
kept clear of the evil intent against Springvale the night before, had
studiously kept the crowd between the priest and himself. We did not
note this then, for we were spell-bound by the story of the Confederate
conspiracy and of Father Le Claire's efforts for our safety.
"The Kiowas, who were on the war-path, have been cut off by the
Verdigris," he concluded. "The waters, that kept me away from Springvale
on this side, kept them off in the southwest. The Osages did us God's
service in our peril, albeit their means were cruel after the manner of
the savage."
A silence fell upon the group on the veranda, as the enormity of what we
had escaped dawned upon us.
"Let us thank God that in his ways, past finding out, He has not
forsaken his children." Dr. Hemingway spoke fervently.
I looked out on the broad street and down toward the river shining in
the May sunlight. The air was very fresh and sweet. The oak trees, were
in their heaviest green, and in the glorious light of day the commonest
things in this little frontier town looked good to me. Across my vision
there swept the picture of that wide, swift-flowing Verdigris River, and
of the dead whose blood stained darkly that fatal sand-bar, their naked
bodies hacked by savage fury, waiting the coming of pitiful hands to
give them shelter in the bosom of the earth. And then I thought of all
these beautiful prairies which the plough was beginning to subdue, of
the homesteads whose chimney smoke I had seen many a morning from my
windows up on Cliff Street. I thought of the little towns and
unprotected villages, and of what an Indian raid would mean to
these,--of murdered men and burning houses, and women dragged away into
a slavery too awful to picture. I thought of Marjie and of what she had
escaped. And then clear, as if he were beside me, I heard O'mie's voice:
"Phil, oh, Phil, come, come!" it pleaded.
I started up and stared around me.
CHAPTER IX
THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSING
Also Time runnin' into years--
A thousand Places left be'ind;
An' Men from both two 'emispheres
Discussin' things of every kind;
So much more near than I 'ad known,
So much more great than I 'ad guessed--
An' me, like all the rest, alone,
But reachin' out to all the rest!
--KIPLING.
"Uncle Cam, where is O'mie? I haven't seen him yet," I broke in upon the
older men in the council. "Could anything have happened to him?"
The priest rose hurriedly.
"I have been hoping to see him every minute," he said. "Has anybody seen
him this morning?"
A flurry followed. Everybody thought he had seen somebody else who had
been with O'mie, but nobody, first hand, could report of him.
"Why, I thought he was with the boys," Cam Gentry exclaimed. "Nobody
could keep track of nobody else last night."
"I thought I saw him this morning," said Dr. Hemingway.
"But"--hesitatingly--"I do not believe I did either. I just had him in
mind as I watched Henry Anderson's boys go by."
"All three of us are not equal to one O'mie," Clayton Anderson declared.
"What part of town did he have, Philip?" asked Le Claire.
"No part," I answered. "We had to take the boys that were out there
under the oak."
Dr. Hemingway called a council at once, and all who knew anything of the
missing boy reported. I could give what had been told to Aunt Candace
and myself only in a general way, in order to shield Tell Mapleson. Cam
had seen O'mie only a minute, just before midnight.
"He went racin' out draggin' somethin' after him, an' jumped over the
porch railin' here," pointing to the north, "stid o' goin' down the
steps. O'mie's double-geared lightin' for quickness anyhow, but last
night he jist made lightnin' seem slow the way he got off the
reservation an' into the street. It roused me up. I was half asleep
settin' here waitin' to put them strangers to bed again. So I set up an'
waited fur the boy to show up an' apologize fur his not bein' no
quicker, when in comes Phil; an' ye all know the rest. I've not laid an
eye on O'mie sence, but bein' short on range I took it he was here but
out of sight. Oh, Lord!" Cam groaned, "can anything have happened to
him?"
While Cam was speaking I noticed that Jean Pahusca who had been loafing
about at the far side of the crowd, was standing behind Father Le
Claire. No one could have told from his set, still face what his
thoughts were just then.
The last one who had seen O'mie was Marjie.
"I had left the door open so I could find the way better," she said. "At
the gate O'mie came running up. I thought he was a girl, for he had my
cloak around him and the hood over his head. His face was very white.
"I supposed it was just the light behind me, made it look so, for he
wasn't the least bit scared. He called to me twice. 'Don't hurry,' he
said; 'I'm taking your cloak home.' Mrs. Judson shut the door just then,
thinking I had gone on, and I ran home, but O'mie flew ahead of me. Just
before I came around the corner I heard a horse start up and dash off to
the river. I ran in to mother and shut the door."
"I met a horse down by the river as I ran to grandpa's after Bill. He
was staying over there last night." It was Dave Mead who spoke. "I made
a grab at the rein. I was crazy to think of such a thing, but--" Dave
didn't say why he tried to stop the horse, for that would mean to repeat
what Tell had told us, and we had to keep Tell's part to ourselves. "The
horse knocked me twenty feet and tore off toward the river."
And then for the first time we noticed Dave Mead's right arm in a sling.
Too much was asked of us in those hours for us to note the things that
mark our common days.
"It put my shoulder out of place," Dave said simply. "Didn't get it in
again for so long, it's pretty sore. I was too busy to think about it at
first."
Dave Mead never put his right hand to his head again. And to-day, if the
broad-shouldered, fine-looking American should meet you on the streets
of Hong Kong, he would offer you his left hand. For hours he forgot
himself to save others. It is his like that have filled Kansas and made
her story a record of heroism like to the story of no other State in all
the nation.
But as to O'mie we could find nothing. There was something strange and
unusual about his returning the borrowed cloak at that late hour. The
whole thing was so unlike O'mie.
"They've killed him and put him in the river," wailed Dollie Gentry.
"I'm afraid he's been foully dealt with. They suspected he knew too
much," and Dr. Hemingway bowed his head in sorrow.
"He's run straight into a coil of them pisen Copperheads an' they've
made way with him; an' to think we hadn't missed him," sobbed Cam in his
chair.
Father Le Claire gripped his hands, and his face grew as expressionless
as the Indian's behind him. It dawned upon us now that O'mie was lost,
there was no knowing how. O'mie, who belonged to the town and was loved
as few orphan boys are loved. Oh, any of us would have suffered for him,
and to think that he should be made the victim of rebel hate, that the
blow should fall on him who had given no offence. All his manliness, his
abounding kindness, his sunny smile and joy in living, swept up in
memory in the instant. Instinctively the boys drew near to one another,
and there came back to me the memory of that pathetic look in his eyes
as we talked of our troubles down in the tavern stables two nights
before: "Whoiver it's laid on to suffer," I could almost hear him saying
it. And then I did hear his voice, low and clear, a faint call again, as
I had heard it before.
"Phil, oh Phil, come!"
It shot through my brain like an arrow. I turned and seized Le Claire by
the hand.
"O'mie's not dead," I cried. "He's alive somewhere, and I'm going to
find him."
"You bet your life he'th not dead," Bud Anderson echoed me. "Come on."
The boys with Le Claire started in a body through the crowd; a shout
went up, a sudden determination that O'mie must be alive seemed to
possess Springvale.
"Stay with Cam and Dollie," Le Claire turned Dr. Hemingway back with a
word. "They need you now. We can do all that can be done."
He strode ahead of us; a stalwart leader of men he would make in any
fray. It flashed into my mind that it was not the Kiowa Indian blood
that made Jean Pahusca seem so stately and strong as he strode down the
streets of Springvale. A red blanket over Le Claire's broad shoulders
would have deceived us into thinking it was the Indian brave leading on
before us.
The river was falling rapidly, and the banks were slimy. Fingal's Creek
was almost at its usual level and the silt was crusting along its
bedraggled borders. Just above where it empties into the Neosho we noted
a freshly broken embankment as though some weight had crushed over the
side and carried a portion of the bank with it. Puddles of water and
black mud filled the little hollows everywhere. Into one of these I
stepped as we were eagerly searching for a trace of the lost boy. My
foot stuck to something soft like a garment in the puddle. I kicked it
out, and a jet button shone in the ooze. I stooped and lifted the grimy
thing. It was Marjie's cloak.
"This is the last of O'mie," Dave Mead spoke reverently.
"Here's where they pushed him in," said John Anderson pointing to the
break in the bank.
There was a buzzing in my ears, and the sunlight on the river was
dancing in ten thousand hideous curls and twists. The last of O'mie,
until maybe, a bloated sodden body might be found half buried in some
flood-wrought sand-bar. The May morning was a mockery, and every green
growing leaf seemed to be using the life force that should be in him.
"Yes, there's where he went in." It was Father Le Claire's voice now,
"but he fought hard for his life."
"Yeth, and by George, yonder'th where he come out. Thee that thaplin'
on the bank? It'th thplit, but it didn't break; an' that bank'th brokener'n
thith."
Oh, blessed Bud! His tow head will always wear a crown to me.
On the farther bank a struggle had wrenched the young trees and shrubs
away and a slide of slime marked where the victim of the waters had
fought for life. We knew how to swim, and we crossed the swollen creek
in a rush. But here all trace disappeared. Something or somebody had
climbed the bank. A horse's hoofs showed in the mud, but on the ground
beyond the horse's feet had not seemed to leave a track. The cruel
ruffians must have pushed him back when he tried to gain the bank here.
We hunted and hunted, but to no avail. No other mark of O'mie's having
passed beyond the creek could be found.
It was nearly sunset before we came back to town. Not a mouthful had
been eaten, and with the tenseness of the night's excitement stretching
every nerve, the loss of sleep, the constant searching, and the
heaviness of despair, mud-stained, wearied, and haggard, we dragged
ourselves to the tavern again. Other searchers had been going in
different directions. In one of these parties, useful, quick and wisely
counselling, was Jean Pahusca. His companions were loud in their praise
of his efforts. The Red Range neighborhood had received the word at noon
and turned out in a mass, women and children joining in the quest. But
it was all in vain. Wild theories filled the air, stories of strangers
struggling with somebody in the dark; the sound of screams and of some
one running away. But none of these stories could be substantiated. And
all the while what Tell Mapleson had said to Aunt Candace and me when
he came to warn us, kept repeating itself to me. "They're awful against
O'mie. They think he knows too much."
Early the next morning the search was renewed, but at nightfall no
further trace of the lost boy had been discovered. On the second
evening, when we gathered at the Cambridge House, Dr. Hemingway urged us
to take a little rest, and asked that we come later to a prayer meeting
in the church.
"O'mie is our one sacrifice beside the dear little babe of Judson's. All
the rest of us have been spared to life, and our homes have been
protected. We must look to the Lord for comfort now, and thank Him for
His goodness to us."
Then the Rev. Mr. Dodd spoke sneeringly:
"You've made a big ado for two days about a little coward who cut and
run at the first sound of danger. Disguised himself like a girl to do
it. He will come sneaking in fast enough when he finds the danger is
over. A lot of us around town are too wise to be deceived. The Lord did
save us," how piously he spoke, "but we should not disgrace ourselves."
He got no further. I had been leaning limply against the veranda post,
for even my strength was giving way, more under the mental strain than
the physical tax. But at the preacher's words all the blood of my
fighting ancestry took fire. There was a Baronet with Cromwell's
Ironsides, the regiment that was never defeated in battle. There was a
Baronet color-bearer at Bunker Hill and later at Saratoga, and it was a
Baronet who waited till the last boat crossed the Delaware when
Washington led his forces to safety. There were Baronets with Perry on
Lake Erie, and at that moment my father was fighting for the life of a
nation. I cleared the space between us at a bound, and catching the
Reverend Dodd by throat and thigh, I lifted him clear of the railing and
flung him sprawling on the blue-grass.
"If you ever say another word against O'mie I'll break your neck," I
cried, as he landed.
Father Le Claire was beside him at once.
"He's killed me," groaned Dodd.
"Then he ought to bury his dead," Dr. Hemingway said coldly, which was
the only time the good old man was ever known to speak unkindly to any
one among us.
The fallen preacher gathered himself together and slipped away.
Dollie Gentry had a royal supper for everybody that night. Jean Pahusca
sat by Father Le Claire with us at the long table in the dining-room.
Again my conscience, which upbraided me for doubting him, and my
instinct, which warned me to beware of him, had their battle within me.
"I just had to do something or I'd have jumped into the Neosho myself,"
Dollie explained in apology for the abundant meal, as if cooking were
too worldly for that grave time. "I know now," she said, "how that poor
woman felt whose little boy was took by the Kiowas years ago out on the
West Prairie. They said she did jump into the river. Anyhow, she
disappeared."
"Did you know her or her husband?" Father Le Claire asked quietly.
"Yes, in a way," Dollie replied. "He was a big, fine-looking man built
some like you, an' dark. He was a Frenchman. She was a little,
small-boned woman. I saw her in the 'Last Chance' store the day she got
here from the East. She was fair and had red hair, I should say; but
they said the woman that drowned herself was a black-haired French
woman. She didn't look French to me. She lived in that little cabin up
around the bend toward Red Range, poor dear! That cabin's always been
haunted, they say."
"Was she never heard of again?" the priest went on. We thought he was
keeping Dollie's mind off O'mie.
"Ner him neither. He cut out west toward Santy Fee with some Mexican
traders goin' home from Westport. I heard he left 'em at Pawnee Rock,
where they had a regular battle with the Kiowas; some thought he might
have been killed by the Kiowas, and others by the Mexicans. Anyhow, he
never was heard of in Springvale no more."
"Mrs. Gentry," Le Claire asked abruptly, "where did you find O'mie?"
"Why, we've had him so long I forget we never hadn't him." Dollie seemed
confused, for O'mie was a part of her life. "He was brought up here from
the South by a missionary. Seems to me he found the little feller (he
was only five years old) trudgin' off alone, an' sayin' he wouldn't stay
at the Mission 'cause there was Injuns there. Said the Injuns killed his
father, an' he kicked an' squalled till the missionary just brought him
up here. He was on his way to St. Mary's, up on the Kaw, an' he was
takin' the little one on with him. He stopped here with O'mie an' the
little feller was hungry--"
"And you fed him; naked, and you clothed him," the priest added
reverently.
"Poor O'mie!" and Dollie made a dive for the kitchen to weep out her
grief alone.
It seemed to settle upon Springvale that O'mie was lost; had been
overcome in some way by the murderous raiders who had infested our town.
In sheer weariness and hopelessness I fell on my bed, that night, and
sleep, the "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care," fell upon
me. Just at daybreak I woke with a start. I had not dreamed once all
night, but now, wide awake, with my face to the open east window where
the rose tint of a grand new day was deepening into purple on the
horizon's edge, feeling and knowing everything perfectly, I saw O'mie's
face before me, white and drawn with pain, but gloriously brave. And his
pleading voice, "Phil, ye'll come soon, won't ye?" sounded low and clear
in my ears.
I sprang up and dressed myself. I was so sure of O'mie, I could hardly
wait to begin another search. Something seemed to impel me to speed. "He
won't last long," was a vague, persistent thought that haunted me.
"What is it, Phil?" my aunt called as I passed her door.
"Aunt Candace, it's O'mie. He's not dead yet, I'm sure. But I must go at
once and hunt again."
"Where will you go now?" she queried.
"I don't know. I'm just being led," I replied.
"Phil," Aunt Candace was at the door now, "have you thought of the
Hermit's Cave?"
Her words went through me like a sword-thrust.
"Why, why,--oh, Aunt Candace, let me think a minute."
"I've been thinking for twelve hours," said my aunt. "Until you try that
place don't give up the hunt."
"But I don't know how to get there."
"Then make a way. You are not less able to do impossible things than the
Pilgrim Fathers were. If you ever find O'mie it will be in that place. I
feel it, I can't say why. But, Phil, you will need the boys and Father
Le Claire. Take time to get breakfast and get yourself together. You
will need all your energy. Don't squander it the first thing."
Dear Aunt Candace! This many a year has her grave been green in the
Springvale cemetery, but greener still is her memory in the hearts of
those who knew her. She had what the scholars of to-day strive to
possess--the power of poise.
I ate my breakfast as calmly as I could, and before I left home Aunt
Candace made me read the Ninety-first Psalm. Then she kissed me good-bye
and bade me God-speed. Something kept telling me to hurry, hurry, as I
tried to be deliberate, and quickened my thought and my step. At the
tavern Cam Gentry met us.
"It ain't no use to try, boys, O'mie's down in the river where the
cussed Copperheads put him; but you're good to keep tryin'." He sat down
in a helpless resignation, so unlike his natural buoyant spirit it was
hard to believe that this was the same Cam we had always known.
"Judson's baby's to be buried to-day, but we can't even bury O'mie. Oh,
it's cruel hard." Cam groaned in his chair.
The dew had not ceased to glitter, and the sun was hardly more than
risen when Father Le Claire and the crowd of boys, reinforced now by
Tell Mapleson and Jim Conlow, started bravely out, determined to find
the boy who had been missing for what seemed ages to us.
"If we find O'mie, we'll send word by the fastest runner, and you must
ring the church bell," Le Claire arranged with Cam. "All the town can
have the word at once then."
"We'll go to the Hermit's Cave first," I announced.
The company agreed, but only Bud Anderson seemed to feel as I did. To
the others it was a wasted bit of heroism, for if none of us had yet
found the way to this retreat, why should we look for O'mie there? So
the boys argued as we hurried to the river. The Neosho was inside its
banks again, but, deep and swift and muddy, it swept silently by us who
longed to know its secrets.
"Philip, why do you consider the cave possible?" Le Claire asked as we
followed the river towards the cliff.
"Aunt Candace says so," I replied.
"Well, it's worth the trial if only to prove a woman's intuition--or
whim," he said quietly.
The same old cliff confronted us, although the many uprooted trees
showed a jagged outcrop this side the sheer wall. We looked up
helplessly at the height. It seemed foolish to think of O'mie being in
that inaccessible spot.
"If he is up there," Dave Mead urged, "and we can get to him, it will be
to put him alongside Judson's baby this afternoon."
All the other boys were for turning back and hunting about Fingal's
Creek again, all except Bud. Such a pink and white boy he was, with a
dimple in each cheek and a blowsy tow head.
"Will you stay with me, Bud, till I get up there?" I asked him.
"Yeth thir! or down there. Let'th go round an' try the other thide."
"Well, I guess we'll all stay with Phil, you cottontop," Tell Mapleson
put in.
We all began to circle round the bluff to get beyond this steep,
forbidding wall. Our plan was to go down the river beyond the cave, and
try to climb up from that point. Crossing along by the edge of the bluff
we passed the steepest part and were coming again to where the treetops
and bushes that clung to the side of the high wall reached above the
crest, as they do across the street from my own home. Just ahead of us,
as we hurried, I caught sight of a flat slab of the shelving rock
slipped aside and barely balancing on the edge, one end of it bending
down the treetops as if newly slid into that place. All about the stone
the thin sod of the bluff's top was cut and trampled as if a struggle
had been there. We examined it carefully. A horse's tracks were plainly
to be seen.
"Something happened here," Le Claire said. "Looks like a horse had been
urged up to the very edge and had kept pulling back."
"And that stone is just slipped from its place," Clayton Anderson
declared. "Something has happened here since the rains."
As we came to the edge, we saw a pile of earth recently scraped from the
stone outcrop above.
"Somebody or something went over here not long ago," I cried.
"Look out, Phil," Bill Mead called, "or somebody else will follow
somebody before 'em--"
Bill's warning came too late. I had stepped on the balanced slab. It
tipped and went over the side with a crash. I caught at the edge and
missed it, but the effort threw me toward the cliff and I slid twenty
feet. The bushes seemed to part as by a well-made opening and I caught a
strong limb, and gained my balance. I looked back at the way I had come.
And then I gave a great shout. The anxious faces peering down at me
changed a little.
"What is it?" came the query.
I pointed upward.
"The nicest set of hand-holds and steps clear up," I called. "You can't
see for the shelf. But right under there where Bud's head is, is the
best place to get a grip and there's a foothold all the way down." I
stared up again. "There's a rope fastened right under there. Bend over,
Bud, careful, and you'll find it. It will let you over to the steps.
Swing in on it."
In truth, a set of points for hand and foot partly natural, partly cut
there, rude but safe enough for boy climbers like ourselves, led down to
my tree lodge.
"And what's below you?" shouted Tell.
"Another tree like this. I don't know how far down if you jump right," I
answered back.
"Well, jump right, for I'm nekth. Ever thee a tow-headed flying
thquirrel?" And Bud was shinning down over the edge clawing tightly the
stone points of vantage.
Many a time in these sixty years have I seen a difficult and dreaded way
grow suddenly easy when the time came to travel it. When we were only
boys idling away the long summer afternoons the cliff was always
impossible. We had rarely tried the downward route, and from below with
the river, always dangerously deep and swift, at the base, our exploring
had brought failure. That hand-hold of leather thongs, braided into a
rope and fastened securely under the ledge out of sight from above, gave
the one who knew how the easy passage to the points of rock. Then for
nearly a hundred feet zigzagging up stream by leaping cautiously to the
right place, by clinging and swinging, the way opened before us. I took
the first twenty feet at a slide. The others caught the leather rope,
testing to see if it was securely fastened. Its two ends were tied
around the deeply grooved stone.
Father Le Claire and Jim Conlow stayed at the top. The one to help us
back again; the other, as the swiftest-footed boy among us, to run to
town with any message needful to be sent. The rest of us, taking all
manner of fearful risks, crashed down over the side of that bluff in
headlong haste.
The Hermit's Cave opened on a narrow ledge such as runs below the
"Rockport" point, where Marjie and I used to play, off Cliff Street. We
reached this ledge at last, hot and breathless, hardly able to realize
that we were really here in the place that had baffled us so long. It
was an almost inaccessible climb to the crest above us, and the cliff
had to be taken at an angle even then. I believe any one accustomed only
to the prairie would never have dared to try it.
The Hermit's Cave was merely a deep recess under the overhanging shelf.
It penetrated far enough to offer a retreat from the weather. The thick
tangle of vines before it so concealed the place that it was difficult
to find it at first. Just beyond it the rock projected over the line of
wall and overhung the river. It was on this point that the old Hermit
had been wont to sit, and from which tradition says he fell to his doom.
It was here we had seen Jean Pahusca on that hot August afternoon the
summer before. How long ago all that seemed now as the memory of it
flashed up in my mind, and I recalled O'mie's quiet boast, "If he can
get up there, so can I!"
I was a careless boy that day. I felt myself a man now, with human
destiny resting on my shoulders. As we came to this rocky projection I
was leading the file of cliff-climbers. The cave was concealed by the
greenery. I stared about and then I called, "O'mie! O'mie!"
Faintly, just beside me, came the reply: "Phil, you 've come? Thank
God!"
I tore through the bushes and vines into the deep recess. The dimness
blinded me at first. What I saw when the glare left my eyes was O'mie
stretched on the bare stones, bound hand and foot. His eyes were burning
like stars in the gloom. His face was white and drawn with suffering,
but he looked up bravely and smiled upon me as I bent over him to lift
him. Before I could speak, Bud had cut the bands and freed him. He
could not move, and I lifted him like a child in my strong arms.
"Is the town safe?" he asked feebly.
"Yes, now we've found you," Dave Mead replied.
"How did you get here, O'mie?" Clayton Anderson asked.
But O'mie, lying limply in my arms, murmured deliriously of the ladder
by the shop, and wondered feebly if it could reach from the river up to
the Hermit's Cave. Then his head fell forward and he lay as one dead on
my knee.
A year before we would have been a noisy crew that worked our way to
this all but inaccessible place, and we would have filled the valley
with whoops of surprise at finding anything in the cavern. To-day we
hardly spoke as we carried O'mie out into the light. He shivered a
little, though still unconscious, and then I felt the hot fever begin to
pulse throughout his body.
Dave Mead was half way up the cliff to Father Le Claire. Out on the
point John Anderson waved, to the crest above, the simple message,
"We've found him."
Bud dived into the cavern and brought out an empty jug, relic of Jean
Pahusca's habitation there.
"What he needth ith water," Bud declared. "I'll bet he'th not had a drop
for two dayth."
"How can you get some, Bud? We can't reach the river from here," I said.
"Bah! all mud, anyhow. I'll climb till I find a thpring. They're all
around in the rockth. The Lord give Motheth water. I'll hunt till He
thoweth me where it ith."
Bud put off in the bushes. Presently his tow head bobbed through the
greenery again and a jug dripping full of cool water was in his hands.
"Thame leadin' that brought uth here done it," he lisped, moistening
O'mie's lips with the precious liquid.
Bud had a quaint use of Bible reference, although he disclaimed Dr.
Hemingway's estimate of him as the best scholar in the Presbyterian
Sunday-school.
It seemed hours before relief came. I held O'mie all that time, hoping
that the gracious May sunshine might win him to us again, but his
delirium increased. He did not know any of us, but babbled of strange
things.
At length many shouts overhead told us that half of Springvale was above
us, and a rude sort of hammock was being lowered. "It's the best we can
do," shouted Father Le Claire. "Tie him in and we'll pull him up."
It was rough handling even with the tenderest of care, and a very
dangerous feat as well. I watched those above draw up O'mie's body and I
was the last to leave the cave. As I turned to go, by merest chance, my
eye caught sight of a knife handle protruding from a crevice in the
rock. I picked it up. It was the short knife Jean Pahusca always wore at
his belt. As I looked closely, I saw cut in script letters across the
steel blade the name, _Jean Le Claire_.
I put the thing in my pocket and soon overtook the other boys, who were
leaping and clinging on their way to the crest.
That night Kansas was swept across by the very worst storm I have known
in all these sixty years. It lifted above the town and spared the
beautiful oak grove in the bottom lands beside us. Further down it swept
the valley clean, and the bluff about the cave had not one shrub on its
rough sides. The lightning, too, played strange pranks. The thunderbolts
shattered trees and rocks, up-rooting the one and rending and tumbling
the other in huge masses of debris upon the valley. It broke even the
rough way we had traversed to the Hermit's Cave, and a great heap of
fallen stone now shut the cavern in like a rock tomb. Where O'mie had
lain was sealed to the world, and it was a full quarter of a century
before a path was made along that dangerous cliff-side again.
CHAPTER X
O'MIE'S CHOICE
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?
--MACAULAY.
There was only one church bell in Springvale for many years. It called
to prayers, or other public service. It sounded the alarm of fire, and
tolled for the dead. It was our school-bell and wedding-bell. It clanged
in terror when the Cheyennes raided eastward in '67, and it pealed out
solemnly for the death of Abraham Lincoln. It chimed on Christmas Eve
and rang in each New Year. Its two sad notes that were tolled for the
years of the little Judson baby had hardly ceased their vibrations when
it broke forth into a ringing, joyous resonance for the finding of O'mie
alive.
O'mie was taken to our home. No other woman's hands were so strong and
gentle as the hands of Candace Baronet. Everybody felt that O'mie could
be trusted nowhere else. It was hard for Cam and Dollie at first, but
when Dollie found she might cook every meal and send it up to my aunt,
she was more reconciled; while Cam came and went, doing a multitude of
kindly acts. This was long before the days of telephones, and a hundred
steps were needed for every one taken to-day.
In the weeks that followed, O'mie hung between life and death. With all
the care and love given him, his strength wasted away. He had been
cruelly beaten, and cuts and bruises showed how terrible had been his
fight for freedom.
At first he talked deliriously, but in the weakness that followed he lay
motionless hour on hour. And with the fever burning out his candle of
life, we waited the end. How heavy-hearted we were in those days! It
seemed as though all Springvale claimed the orphan boy. And daily,
morning and evening, a messenger from Red Range came for word of him,
bearing always offers of whatever help we would accept from the
kind-hearted neighborhood.
Father Le Claire had come into our home with the bringing of O'mie, and
gentle as a woman's were his ministrations. One evening, when the end of
earthly life seemed near for O'mie, the priest took me by the arm, and
we went down to the "Rockport" point together. The bushes were growing
very rank about my old playground and trysting place. I saw Marjie
daily, for she came and went about our house with quiet usefulness. But
our hands and hearts were full of the day's sad burden, and we hardly
spoke to each other. Marjie's nights were spent mostly with poor Mrs.
Judson, whose grief was wearing deep grooves into the young mother face.
To-night Le Claire and I sat down on the rock and breathed deeply of the
fresh June air. Below us, for many a mile, the Neosho lay like a broad
belt of silver in the deepening shadows of the valley, while all the
West Prairie was aflame with the sunset lights. The world was never more
beautiful, and the spirit of the Plains seemed reaching out glad hands
to us who were so strong and full of life. All day we had watched beside
the Irish boy. His weakened pulse-beat showed how steadily his strength
was ebbing. He had fallen asleep now, and we dared not think what the
waking might be for us.
"Philip, when O'mie is gone, I shall leave Springvale," the priest
began. "I think that Jean Pahusca has at last decided to go to the
Osages. He probably will never be here again. But if he should come--"
Le Claire paused as if the words pained him--"remember you cannot trust
him. I have no tie that binds me to you. I shall go to the West. I feel
sure the Plains Indians need me now more than the Osages and the Kaws."
I listened silently, not caring to question why either O'mie or Jean
should bind him anywhere. The former was all but lost to me already. Of
the latter I did not care to think.
"And before I go, I want to tell you something I know of O'mie," Le
Claire went on.
I had wondered often at the strange sort of understanding I knew existed
between himself and O'mie. I began to listen more intently now, and for
the first time since leaving the Hermit's Cave I thought of the knife
with the script lettering. I shrank from questioning him or showing him
the thing. I had something of my father's patience in letting events
tell me what I wanted to know. So I asked no questions, but let him
speak.
"O'mie comes by natural right into a dislike, even hatred, of the red
race. It may be I know something more of him than anyone else in
Springvale knows. His story is a romance and a tragedy, stranger than
fiction. In the years to come, when hate shall give place to love in our
nation, when the world is won to the church, a younger generation will
find it hard to picture the life their forefathers lived."
The priest's brow darkened and his lips were compressed, as if he found
it hard to speak what he would say.
"I come to you, Philip, because your experience here has made you a man
who were only a boy yesterday; because you love O'mie; because you have
been able to keep a quiet tongue; and most of all, because you are John
Baronet's son, and heir, I believe, to his wisdom. Most of O'mie's story
is known to your father. He found it out just before he went to the war.
It is a tragical one. The boy was stolen by a band of Indians when he
was hardly more than a baby. It was a common trick of the savages then;
it may be again as our frontier creeps westward."
The priest paused and looked steadily out over the Neosho Valley,
darkening in the twilight.
"You know how you felt when O'mie was lost. Can you imagine what his
mother felt when she found her boy was stolen? Her husband was away on a
trapping tour, had been away for a long time, and she was alone. In a
very frenzy, she started out on the prairie to follow the Indians. She
suffered terrible hardship, but Providence brought her at last to the
Osage Mission, whose doors are always open to the distressed. And here
she found a refuge. A strange thing happened then. While Patrick
O'Meara, O'mie's father, was far from home, word had reached him that
his wife was dead. Coming down the Arkansas River, O'Meara chanced to
fall in with some Mexicans who had a battle with a band of Indians at
Pawnee Rock. With these Indians was a little white boy, whom O'Meara
rescued. It was his own son, although he did not know it, and he brought
the little one to the Mission on the Neosho.
"Philip, it is vouchsafed to some of us to know a bit of heaven here on
earth. Such a thing came to Patrick O'Meara when he found his wife
alive, and the baby boy was restored to her. They were happy together
for a little while. But Mrs. O'Meara never recovered from her hardships
on the prairie, and her husband was killed by the Comanches a month
after her death. Little O'mie, dying up there now, was left an orphan at
the Mission. You have heard Mrs. Gentry tell of his coming here. Your
father is the only one here who knows anything of O'mie's history. If he
never comes back, you must take his place."
The purple shadows of twilight were folding down upon the landscape. In
the soft light the priest's face looked dark and set.
"Why not tell me now what father knows?" I asked.
"I cannot tell you that now, Philip. Some day I may tell you another
story. But it does not concern you or O'mie. What I want you to do is
what your father will do if he comes home. If he should not come, he has
written in his will what you must do. I need not tell you to keep this
to yourself."
"Father Le Claire, can you tell me anything about Jean Pahusca, and
where he is now?"
He rose hastily.
"We must not stay here." Then, kindly, he took my hand. "Yes, some day,
but not now, not to-night." There was a choking in his voice, and I
thought of O'mie.
We stood up and let the cool evening air ripple against our faces. The
Neosho Valley was black now. Only here and there did we catch the
glitter of the river. The twilight afterglow was still pink, but the
sweep of the prairie was only a purple blur swathed in gray mist. Out of
this purple softness, as we parted the bushes, we saw Marjie hurrying
toward us.
"Phil, Phil!" she cried, "O'mie's taken a change for the better. He's
been asleep for three hours, and now he is awake. He knew Aunt Candace
and he asked for you. The doctor says he has a chance to live. Oh,
Phil!" and Marjie burst into tears.
Le Claire took her hand and, putting it through my arm, he said, gently
as my father might have done, "You are both too young for such a strain
as this. Oh, this civil war! It robs you of your childhood. Too soon,
too soon, you are men and women. Philip, take Marjory home. Don't
hurry." He smiled as he spoke. "It will do you good to leave O'mie out
of mind for a little while."
Then he hurried off to the sick room, leaving us together. It seemed
years since that quiet April sunset when we gathered the pink flowers
out in the draw, and I crowned Marjie my queen. It was now late June,
and the first little yellow leaves were on the cottonwoods, telling that
midsummer was near.
"Marjie," I said, putting the hand she had withdrawn through my arm
again, "the moon is just coming up. Let's go out on the prairie a little
while. Those black shadows down there distress me. I must have some rest
from darkness."
We walked slowly out on Cliff Street and into the open prairie, which
the great summer moon was flooding with its soft radiance. No other
light is ever so regal as the full moon above the prairie, where no
black shadows can checker and blot out and hem in its limitless glory.
Marjie and I were young and full of vigor, but the steady drain on mind
and heart, and the days and nights of broken rest, were not without
effect. And yet to-night, with hope once more for O'mie's life, with a
sense of lifted care, and with the high tide of the year pouring out its
riches round about us, the peace of the prairies fell like a benediction
on us, as we loitered about the grassy spaces, quiet and very happy.
Then the care for others turned our feet homeward. I must relieve Aunt
Candace to-night by O'mie's side, and Marjie must be with her mother.
The moonlight tempted us to linger a little longer as we passed by
"Rockport," and we parted the bushes and stood on our old playground
rock.
"Marjie, the moonlight makes a picture of you always," I said gently.
She did not answer, but gazed out across the valley, above whose dark
greenery the silvery mists lay fold on fold. When she turned her face to
mine, something in her eyes called up in me that inspiration that had
come to be a part of my thought of her, that sense of a woman's worth
and of her right to tenderest guardianship.
"Marjie"--I put both arms around her and drew her to me--"the best thing
in the world is a good girl, and you are the best girl in the world." I
held her close. It was no longer a boy's admiration, but a man's love
that filled my soul that night. Marjie drew gently away.
"We must go now, Phil, indeed we must. Mother needs me."
Oh, I could wait her time. I took her arm and led her out to the street.
The bushes closed behind us, and we went our way together. It was well
we could not look back upon the rock. We had hardly left it when two
figures climbed up from the ledge below and stood where we had been--two
for whom the night had no charm and the prairie and valley had no
beauty, a low-browed, black-eyed girl with a heart full of jealousy, and
a tall, graceful, picturesquely handsome young Indian. They had joined
forces, just as I had once felt they would sometime do. As I came
whistling up the street on my way home I paused by the bushes, half
inclined to go beyond them again. I was happy in every fiber of my
being. But duty prodded me sharply to move on. I believe now that Jean
Pahusca would have choked the life out of me had I met him face to face
that moonlit night. Heaven turns our paths away from many an unknown
peril, and we credit it all to our own choice of ways.
* * * * *
Slowly but steadily O'mie came back to us. So far had he gone down the
valley of the shadow, he groped with difficulty up toward the light
again. He slept much, but it was life-giving sleep, and he was not
overcome by delirium after that turning point in his illness. I think I
never fully knew my father's sister till in those weeks beside the
sickbed. It was not the medicine, nor the careful touch, it was
herself--her wholesome, hopeful, trustful spirit--that seemed to enter
into the very life of the sick one, and build him to health. I had
rarely known illness, I who had muscles like iron, and the frame of a
giant. My father was a man of wonderful vigor. It was not until O'mie
was brought to our house that I understood why he should have been
trusted to no one else.
We longed to know his story. The town had settled into its old groove.
The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg had thrilled us, as the loss
at Chancellorsville had depressed our spirits; and the war was our
constant theme. And then the coming and going of traders and strangers
on the old trail, the undercurrent of anxiety lest another conspiracy
should gather, the Quantrill raid at Lawrence, all helped to keep us
from lethargy. We had had our surprise, however. Strangers had to give
an account of themselves to the home guard now. But we were softened
toward our own townspeople. They were very discreet, and we must meet
and do business with them daily. For the sake of young Tell and Jim, we
who knew would say nothing. Jean came into town at rare intervals,
meeting the priest down in the chapel. Attending to his own affairs,
walking always like a very king, or riding as only a Plains Indian can
ride, he came and went unmolested. I never could understand that strange
power he had of commanding our respect. He seldom saw Marjie, and her
face blanched at the mention of his name. I do not know when he last
appeared in our town that summer. Nobody could keep track of his
movements. But I do know that after the priest's departure, his
disappearance was noted, and the daylight never saw him in Springvale
again. What the dark hours of the night could have told is another
story.
With O'mie out of danger, Le Claire left us. His duties, he told us, lay
far to the west. He might go to the Kiowas or the Cheyennes. In any
event, it would be long before he came again.
"I need not ask you, Philip, to take good care of O'mie. He could not
have better care. You will guard his interests. Until you know more than
you do now, you will say nothing to him or any one else of what I have
told you."
He looked steadily into my eyes, and I understood him.
"I think Jean Pahusca will never trouble you, nor even come here now. I
have my reasons for thinking so. But, Philip, if you should know of his
being here, keep on your guard. He is a man of more than savage nature.
What he loves, he will die for. What he hates, he will kill. Cam Gentry
is right. The worst blood of the Kiowas and of the French nationality
fills his veins. Be careful."
Brave little O'mie struggled valiantly for health again. He was patient
and uncomplaining, but the days ran into weeks before his strength
began to increase. Only one want was not supplied: he longed for the
priest.
"You're all so good, it's mighty little in me to say it, an' Dr.
Hemingway's gold, twenty-four karat gold; but me hair's red, an' me rale
name's O'Meara, an' naturally I long for the praist, although I'm a
proper Presbyterian."
"How about Brother Dodd?" I inquired.
"All the love in his heart fur me put in the shell of a mustard seed
would rattle round loike a walnut in a tin bushel box, begorra," the
sick boy declared.
It was long before he could talk much and we did not ask a question we
could avoid, but waited his own time to know how he had been taken from
us and how he had found himself a prisoner in that cavern whence we had
barely cheated Death of its pitiful victim. As he could bear it he told
us, at length, of his part in the night the town was marked for doom.
Propped up on his pillows, his face to the open east window, his thin,
white hands folded, he talked quietly as of a thing in which he had had
little part.
"Ye see, Phil, the Almighty made us all different, so He could know us,
an' use us when He wanted some partic'lar thing that some partic'lar one
could do. When folks puts on a uniform in their dress or their thinkin',
they belong to one av two classes--them as is goin' to the devil like
convicts an' narrow churchmen, or them as is goin' after 'em hard to
bring 'em into line again, like soldiers an' sisters av charity; an'
they just have to act as one man. But mainly we're singular number. The
Lord didn't give me size."
He looked up at my broad shoulders. I had carried him in my arms from
his bed to the east window day after day.
"I must do me own stunt in me own way. You know mebby, how I tagged
thim strangers till, if they'd had the chance at me they'd have fixed
me. Specially that Dick Yeager, the biggest av the two who come to the
tavern."
"The chance! Didn't they have their full swing at you?"
"Well, no, not regular an' proper," he replied.
I wondered if the cruelty he had suffered might not have injured his
brain and impaired his memory.
"You know I peeked through that hole up in the shop that Conlow seems to
have left fur such as me. Honorable business, av coorse. But Tell and
Jim, they was hid behind the stack av wagon wheels in the dark
corner--just as honorable an' high-spirited as meself, on their social
level. I was a high-grader up on that ladder. Well, annyhow, I peeked
an' eavesdropped, as near as I could get to the eaves av the shop, an' I
tould Father Le Claire all I could foind out. An' then he put it on me
to do my work. 'You can be spared,' he says. 'If it's life and death,
ye'll choose the better part.' Phil, it was laid on all av us to choose
that night."
His thin, blue-veined hand sought mine where he lay reclining against
the pillows. I took it in my big right hand, the hand that could hold
Jean Pahusca with a grip of iron.
"There was only one big enough an' brainy enough an' brave enough to
lead the crowd to save this town an' that was Philip Baronet. There was
only one who could advise him well an' that was Cam Gentry. Poor old
Cam, too near-sighted to tell a cow from a catfish tin feet away. Without
you, Cam and the boys couldn't have done a thing.
"Can ye picture what would be down there now? I guess not, fur you'd not
be making pictures now, You'd be a picture yourself, the kind they put
on the carbolic acid bottle an' mark 'pizen.'"
O'mie paused and looked out dreamily across the valley to the east
plains beyond them.
"I can't tell how fast things wint through me moind that night. You did
some thinkin' yourself, an' you know. 'I can't do Phil's part if I stay
here,' I raisoned, 'an' bedad, I don't belave he can do my part. Bein'
little counts sometimes. It's laid on me to be the sacrifice, an' I'll
kape me promise an' choose the better part. I'll cut an' run.'"
He looked up at my questioning face with a twinkle in his eye.
"'There's only one to save this town. That's Phil's stunt,' I says; 'an'
there's only one to save Marjie. That's my stunt.'"
I caught my breath, for my heart stood still, and I felt I must
strangle.
"Do you mean to say, Thomas O'Meara--?" I could get no fuither.
"I mane, either you or me's got to tell this. If you know it better'n I
do, go ahead." And then more gently he went on: "Yes, I mane to say,
kape still, dear; I'm not very strong yet. If I'd gone up to Cliff
Street afther you to come to her, she'd be gone. If Jean got hands on
her an' she struggled or screamed, as she'd be like to do, bein' a
sensible girl, he had that murderous little short knife, an' he'd swore
solemn he'd have her or her scalp. He's not got her, nor her scalp, nor
that knife nather now. I kept that much from doin' harm. I dunno where
the cruel thing wint to, but it wint, all right.
"And do ye mane to say, Philip Baronet, that ye thought I'd lost me
nerve an' was crude enough to fall in wid a nest av thim Copperheads
an' let 'em do me to me ruin? Or did you think His Excellency, the
Reverend Dodd was right, an' I'd cut for cover till the fuss was over?
Well, honestly now, I'm not that kind av an Irishman."
My mind was in a tumult as I listened. I wondered how O'mie could be so
calm when I durst not trust myself to speak.
"So I run home, thinkin' ivery jump, an' I grabbed the little girl's
waterproof cloak. Your lady friends' wraps comes in handy sometimes.
Don't niver despise 'em, Phil, nor the ladies nather. You woman-hater!"
O'mie's laugh was like old times and very good to hear.
"I flung that thing round me, hood on me brown curls, an' all, an' then
I flew. I made the ground just three times in thim four blocks and a
half to Judson's. You know how the kangaroo looks in the geography
picture av Australia, illustratin' the fauna an' flora, with a tall,
thin tree beyont, showin' lack of vegetation in that tropic, an' a
little quilly cus they call a ornithorynchus, its mouth like Jim
Conlow's? Well, no kangaroo'd had enough self-respect to follow me that
night. I caught Marjie just in time, an' I puts off before her toward
her home. At the corner I quit kangarooin' an' walks quick an' a little
timid-like, just Marjie to a dimple. If you'd been there, you'd wanted
to put some more pink flowers round where they'd do the most good."
I squeezed his hand.
"Quit that, you ugly bear. That's a lady's hand yet a whoile an' can't
stand too much pressure.
"It was to save her loife, Phil." O'mie spoke solemnly now. "You could
save the town. I couldn't. I could save her. You couldn't. In a minute,
there in the dark by the gate, Jean Pahusca grabs me round me dainty
waist. His horse was ready by him an' he swung me into the saddle, not
harsh, but graceful like, an' gintle. I never said a word, but gave a
awful gasp like I hadn't no words, appreciative enough. 'I'm saving'
you, Star-face,' he says. 'The Copperheads will burn your mother's house
an' the Kiowas will come and steal Star-face--' an' he held me close as
if he would protect me--he got over that later--an' I properly fainted.
That's the only way the abducted princess can do in the novel--just
faint. It saves hearin' what you don't want to know. An' me size just
suited the case. Don't never take on airs, you big hulkin' fellow. No
graceful prince is iver goin' to haul you over the saddle-bow thinkin'
you're the choice av his heart. It saved Marjie, an' it got Jean clear
av town before he found his mistake, which wa'n't bad for Springvale.
Down by Fingal's Creek I come to, an' we had a rumpus. Bein' a dainty
girl, I naturally objected to goin' into that swirlin' water, though I
didn't object to Jean's goin'--to eternity. In the muss I lost me
cloak--the badge av me business there. I never could do nothin' wid thim
cussed hooks an' eyes on a collar an' the thing wasn't anchored
securely at me throat. It was awful then. I can't remember it all. But
it was dark, and Jean had found me out, and the waters was deep and
swift. The horse got away on the bank an' slid back, I think. It must
have been then it galloped up to town; but findin' Jean didn't follow,
it came back to him. I didn't know annything fur some toime. I'd got
too much av Fingal's Creek mixed into me constitution an' by-laws to
kape my thoughts from floatin' too. I'll never know rightly whin I rode
an' whin I was dragged, an' whin I walked. It was a runnin' fight av
infantry and cavalry, such as the Neosho may never see again, betwixt
the two av us."
Blind, trustful fool that I had been, thinking after all Le Claire's
warnings that Jean had been a good, loyal, chivalrous Indian, protecting
Marjie from harm.
"And to think we have thought all this time there were a dozen Rebels
making away with you, and never dreamed you had deliberately put
yourself into the hands of the strongest and worst enemy you could
have!"
"It was to save a woman, Phil," O'mie said simply. "He could only kill
me. He wouldn't have been that good to her. You'd done the same yoursilf
to save anny woman, aven a stranger to you. Wait an' see."
How easily forgotten things come back when we least expect them. There
came to me, as O'mie spoke, the memory of my dream the night after Jean
had sought Marjie's life out on the Red Range prairie. The night after I
talked with my father of love and of my mother. That night two women
whom I had never seen before were in my dreams, and I had struggled to
save them from peril as though they were of my own flesh and blood.
"You will do it," O'mie went on. "You were doing more. Who was it wint
down along the creek side av town where the very worst pro-slavery
fellows is always coiled and ready to spring, wint in the dark to wake
up folks that lived betwixt them on either side, who was ready to light
on 'em at a minute's notice? Who wint upstairs above thim as was gettin'
ready to burn 'em in their beds, an' walked quiet and cool where one
wrong step meant to be throttled in the dark? Don't talk to me av
courage."
"But, O'mie, it was all chance with us. You went where danger was
certain."
"It was my part, Phil, an' I ain't no shirker just because I'm not tin
feet tall an' don't have to be weighed on Judson's stock scales." O'mie
rested awhile on the pillows. Then he continued his story.
"They was more or less border raidin' betwixt Jean an' me till we got
beyont the high cliff above the Hermit's Cave. When I came to after one
of his fists had bumped me head he was urgin' his pony to what it didn't
want. The river was roarin' below somewhere an' it was black as the
grave's insides. It was way up there that in a minute's lull in the
hostilities, I caught the faint refrain:
'Does the star-spangled banner yit wave,
O'er the land av the free and the home av the brave?'
"I didn't see your lights. They was tin thousand star-spangled banners
wavin' before me eyes ivery second. But that strain av song put new
courage into me soul though I had no notion what it really meant. I was
half dead an' wantin' to go the other half quick, an' it was like a
drame, till that song sent a sort of life-givin' pulse through me. The
next minute we were goin' over an' over an' over, betwane rocks, an'
hanging to trees, down, down, down, wid that murderous river roarin'
hungry below us. Jean jumpin' from place to place an' me clingin' to
him an' hittin' iverything that could be hit at ivery jump. An' then
come darkness over me again. There was a light somewhere when I
come to. I was free an' I made a quick spring. I got that knife,
an' like a flash I slid the blade down a crack somewhere. An'
then he tied me solid, an' standin' over me he says slow an'
cruel: 'You--may--stay--here--till--you--starve--to--death.
Nobody--can--get--to--you--but--me--an'--I'm--niver--comin'--back. I
hate you.' An' his eyes were just loike that noight whin I found him
with thim faded pink flowers out on the prairie."
"O'mie, dear, you are the greatest hero I ever heard of. You poor,
beaten, tortured sacrifice."
I put my arm around his shoulder and my tears fell on his red hair.
"I didn't do no more than ivery true American will do--fight an' die to
protect his home; or if not his'n, some other man's. Whin the day av
choosin' comes we can't do no more 'n to take our places. We all do it.
Whin Jean put it on me to lay there helpless an' die o' thirst, I know'd
I could do it. Same as you know'd you'd outwit that gang ready to burn
an' kill, that I'd run from. I just looked straight up at Jean--the
light was gettin' dim--an' I says, 'You--may--go--plum--to--the--divil,
--but--you--can't--hurt--that--part--av--me--that's--never--hungry--nor
--thirsty.' When you git face to face wid a thing like that," O'mie spoke
reverently, "somehow the everlastin' arms, Dr. Hemingway's preaches of,
is strong underneath you. The light wint out, an' Jean in his still way
had slid off, an' I was alone. Alone wid me achin' and me bonds, an' wid
a burnin' longin' fur water, wid a wish to go quick if I must go; but
most av all--don't never furgit it, Phil, whin the thing overtakes you
aven in your strength--most av all, above all sufferin' and natural
longin' to live--there comes the reality av the words your Aunt Candace
taught us years ago in the little school:
"'Though I walk through the valley av the shadow av death, I will fear
no evil.'
"I called for you, Phil, in my misery, as' I know'd somehow you'd hear
me. An' you did come."
His thin hand closed over mine, and we sat long in silence--two boys
whom the hand of Providence was leading into strange, hard lines,
shaping us each for the work the years of our manhood were waiting to
bring to us.
CHAPTER XI
GOLDEN DAYS
There are days that are kind
As a mother to man, showing pathways that wind
Out and in, like a dream, by some stream of delight;
Never hinting of aught that they hold to affright;
Only luring us on, since the way must be trod,
Over meadows of green with their velvety sod,
To the steeps, that are harder to climb, far before.
There are nights so enchanting, they seem to restore
The original beauty of Eden; so tender,
They woo every soul to a willing surrender
Of feverish longing; so holy withal,
That a broad benediction seems sweetly to fall
On the world.
We were a busy folk in those years that followed the close of the war.
The prairies were boundless, and the constant line of movers' wagons
reaching out endlessly on the old trail, with fathers and mothers and
children, children, children, like the ghosts of Banquo's lineal issue
to King Macbeth, seemed numerous enough to people the world and put to
the plough every foot of the virgin soil of the beautiful Plains. With
the downfall of slavery the strife for commercial supremacy began in
earnest here, and there are no idle days in Kansas.
When I returned home after two years' schooling in Massachusetts, I
found many changes. I had beaten my bars like a caged thing all those
two years. Rockport, where I made my home and spent much of my time,
was so unlike Springvale, so wofully and pridefully ignorant of all
Kansas, so unable to get any notion of my beautiful prairies and of the
free-spirited, cultured folk I knew there, that I suffered out my time
there and was let off a little early for good behavior. Only one person
did I know who had any real interest in my West, a tall, dark-eyed,
haughty young lady, to whom I talked of Kansas by the hour. Her mother,
who was officiously courteous to me, didn't approve of that subject, but
the daughter listened eagerly.
When I left Rockport, Rachel--that was her name, Rachel Melrose--asked
me when I was coming back. I assured her, never, and then courteously
added if she would come to Kansas.
"Well, I may go," she replied, "not to your Springvale, but to my aunt
in Topeka for a visit next Fall. Will you come up to Topeka?"
Of course, I would go to Topeka, but might she not come to Springvale?
There were the best people on earth in Springvale. I could introduce her
to boys who were gentlemen to the core. I'd lived and laughed and
suffered with them, and I knew.
"But I shouldn't care for any of them except you." Rachel's voice
trembled and I couldn't help seeing the tears in her proud dark eyes.
"Oh, I've a girl of my own there," I said impulsively, for I was always
longing for Marjie, "but Clayton Anderson and Dave Mead are both college
men now." And then I saw how needlessly rude I had been.
"Of course I want you to come to Springvale. Come to our house. Aunt
Candace will make you royally welcome. The Baronets and Melroses have
been friends for generations. I only wanted the boys to know you; I
should be proud to present my friend to them. I would take care of you.
You have been so kind to me this year, I should be glad to do much for
you." I had taken her hand to say good-bye.
"And you would let that other girl take care of herself, wouldn't you,
while I was there? Promise me that when I go to Kansas you will come up
to Topeka to see me, and when I go to your town, if I do, you will not
neglect me but will let that Springvale girl entirely alone."
I did not know much of women then--nor now--although I thought then I
knew everything. I might have read behind that fine aristocratic face a
supremely selfish nature, a nature whose pleasure increased only as her
neighbor's pleasure decreased. There are such minds in the world.
I turned to her, and taking both of her willing hands in mine, I said
frankly: "When you visit your aunt, I'll be glad to see you there. If
you visit my aunt I would be proud to show you every courtesy. As for
that little girl, well, when you see her you will understand. She has a
place all her own with me." I looked straight into her eyes as I said
this.
She smiled coquettishly. "Oh, I'm not afraid of her," she said
indifferently; "I can hold my own with any Kansas, girl, I'm sure."
She was dangerously handsome, with a responsive face, a winning smile
and gracious manners. She seemed never to accept anything as a gift, but
to take what was her inherent right of admiration and devotion. When I
bade her good-bye a look of sadness was in her eyes. It rebuked my
spirit somehow, although Heaven knows I had given her no cause to miss
me. But my carriage was waiting and I hurried away. For a moment only
her image lingered with me, and then I forgot her entirely; for every
turn of the wheel was bringing me to Kansas, to the prairies, to the
beautiful Neosho Valley, to the boys again, to my father and home, but
most of all to Marjie.
It was twenty months since I had seen her. She had spent a year in Ohio
in the Girls' College at Glendale, and had written me she would reach
Springvale a month before I did. After that I had not heard from her
except through a marked copy of the _Springvale Weekly Press_, telling
of her return. She had not marked that item, but had pencilled the news
that "Philip Baronet would return in three weeks from Massachusetts,
where he had been enjoying the past two years in school."
Enjoying! Under this Marjie had written in girlish hand, "Hurry up,
Phil."
On the last stage of my journey I was wild with delight. It was
springtime on the prairies, and a verdure clothed them with its richest
garments. I did not note the growing crops, and the many little
freeholds now, where there had been only open unclaimed land two years
before. I was longing for the Plains again, for one more ride, reckless
and free, across their broad stretches, for one more gorgeous sunset out
on Red Range, one more soft, iridescent twilight purpling down to the
evening darkness as I had seen it on "Rockport" all those years. How the
real Rockport, the Massachusetts town, faded from me, and the sea, and
the college halls, and city buildings. The steam and steel and brick and
marble of an older civilization, all gave place to Nature's broad
handiwork and the generous-hearted, capable, unprejudiced people of this
new West. However crude and plain Springvale might have seemed to an
Eastern boy suddenly transplanted here, it was fair and full of delight
for me.
The stage driver, Dever, by name, was a stranger to me, but he knew all
about my coming. Also he was proud to be the first to give me the
freshest town gossip. That's the stage-driver's right divine always. I
was eager to hear of everybody and in this forty miles' ride I was
completely informed. The story rambled somewhat aimlessly from topic to
topic, but it never lagged.
"Did I know Judson? He'd got a controlling interest now in Whately's
store. He was great after money, Judson was. They do say he's been a
little off the square getting hold of the store. The widder Whately kept
only about one-third, or maybe one-fourth of the stock. Mrs. Whately,
she wa'n't no manager. Marjie'd do better, but Marjie wa'n't twenty yet.
And yet if all they say's true she wouldn't need to manage. Judson is
about the sprucest widower in town, though he did seem to take it so
hard when poor Mis' Judson was taken." She never overcame the loss of
her baby, and the next Summer they put her out in the prairie graveyard
beside it. "But Judson now, he's shyin' round Marjie real coltish.
"It'd be fine fur her, of course," my driver went on, "an' she was old
a-plenty to marry. Marjie was a mighty purty girl. The boys was nigh
crazy about her. Did I know her?"
I did; oh, yes, I remembered her.
"They's another chap hangin' round her, too; his name's--lemme see,
uh--common enough name when I was a boy back in Kentucky--uh--Tillhurst,
Richard Tillhurst. Tall, peaked, thin-visaged feller. Come out from
Virginny to Illinois. Got near dead with consumption 'nd come on to
Kansas to die. Saw Springvale 'nd thought better of it right away. Was
teachin' school and payin' plenty of attention to the girls, especially
Marjie. They was an old man Tillhurst when I was a boy. He was from
Virginny, too--" but I pass that story.
"Tell Mapleson's pickin' up sence he's got the post-office up in the
'Last Chance'; put that doggery out'n his sullar, had in wall paper now,
an' drugs an' seeds, an' nobody was right sure where he got his funds to
stock up, so--they was some sort of story goin' about a half-breed named
Pahusky when I first come here, bein' 'sociated with Mapleson--Cam
Gentry's same old Cam, squintin' round an' jolly as ever. O'mie? Oh,
he's leadin' the band now. By jinks, that band of his'n will just take
the cake when it goes up to Topeky this Fall to the big political
speak-in's." On and on the driver went, world without end, until we
caught the first faint line along the west that marked the treetops of
the Neosho Valley. We were on the Santa Fe Trail now, and we were coming
to the east bluff where I had first seen the little Whately girl climb
out of the big wagon and stretch the stiffness out of her fat little
legs. The stage horses were bracing for the triumphal entry into town,
when a gang of young outlaws rushed up over the crest of the east slope.
They turned our team square across the way and in mock stage-robbery
style called a halt. The driver threw up his hands in mock terror and
begged for mercy, which was granted if he would deliver up one Philip
Baronet, student and tenderfoot. But I was already down from the stage
and O'mie was hugging me hard until Bud Anderson pulled him away and all
the boys and girls were around me. Oh, it was good to see them all
again, but best of all was it to see Marjie. She had been a pretty
picture of a young girl. She was beautiful now. No wonder she had many
admirers. She was last among the girls to greet me. I took her hand and
our eyes met. Oh, I had no fear of widower nor of school-teacher, as I
helped her to a seat beside me in the stage.
"I'm so glad to see you again, Phil," she looked up into my face. "You
are bigger than ever."
"And you are just the same Marjie."
The crowd piled promiscuously about us and we bumped down the slope and
into the gurgling Neosho, laughing and happy.
With all the rough and tumble years of a boyhood and youth on the
frontier, the West has been good to me, and I look back along the way
glad that mine was the pioneer's time, and that the experiences of those
early days welded into my building and being something of their
simplicity, and strength, and capacity for enjoyment. But of all the
seasons along the way of these sixty years, of all the successes and
pleasures, I remember best and treasure most that glorious summer after
my return from the East. My father was on the Judge's bench now and his
legal interests and property interests were growing. I began the study
of law under him at once, and my duties were many, for he put
responsibility on me from the first. But I was in the very heyday of
life, and had no wish ungratified.
"Phil, I want you to go up the river and take a look at two quarters of
Section 29, range 14, this afternoon. It lies just this side of the big
cottonwood," my father said to me one June day.
"Make a special note of the land, and its natural appurtenances. I want
the information at once, or you needn't go out on such a hot day. It's
like a furnace in the courthouse. It may be cooler out that way." He
fanned his face with his straw hat, and the light breeze coming up the
valley lifted the damp hair about his temples.
"There's a bridle path over the bluff a mile or so out, where you can
ride a horse down and go up the river in the bottom. It's a much shorter
way, but you'd better go out the Red Range road and turn north at the
third draw well on to the divide. It gets pretty steep near the river,
so you have to keep to the west and turn square at the draw. If it
wasn't so warm you might go on to Red Range for some depositions for me.
But never mind, Dave Mead is going up there Monday, anyhow. Will you
ride the pony?"
"No, I'll go out in the buggy."
"And take some girl along? Well, don't forget your errand. Be sure to
note the lay of the land. There's no building, I believe, but a little
stone cabin and it's been empty for years; but you can see. Be sure to
examine everything in that cabin carefully. Stop at the courthouse as
you go out, and get the surveyor's map and some other directions."
It was a hot summer day, with that thin, dry burning in the air that the
light Kansas zephyr fanned back in little rippling waves. My horses were
of the Indian pony breed, able to go in heat or cold. Most enduring and
least handsome of the whole horse family, with temper ranging from
moderately vicious to supremely devilish, is this Indian pony of the
Plains.
Marjie was in the buggy beside me when I stopped at the courthouse for
instructions. Lettie Conlow was passing and came to the buggy's side.
"Where are you going, Marjie?" she asked. There was a sullen minor tone
in her voice.
"With Phil, out somewhere. Where is it you are going, Phil?"
I was tying the ponies. They never learned how to stand unanchored a
minute.
"Out north on the Red Range prairie to buy a couple of quarters," I
replied carelessly and ran up the courthouse steps.
"Well, well, well," Cam Gentry roared as he ambled up to the buggy.
Cam's voice was loud in proportion as his range of vision was short.
"You two gettin' ready to elope? An' he's goin' to git his dad to back
him up gettin' a farm. Now, Marjie, why'd you run off? Let us see the
performance an' hear Dr. Hemingway say the words in the Presbyterian
Church. Or maybe you're goin' to hunt up Dodd. He went toward Santy Fee
when he put out of here after the War."
Cam could be heard in every corner of the public square. I was at the
open window of my father's office. Looking out, I saw Lettie staring
angrily at Cam, who couldn't see her face. She had never seemed less
attractive to me. She had a flashy coloring, and she made the most of
ornaments. Some people called her good-looking. Beside Marjie, she was
as the wild yoncopin to the calla lily. Marjie knew how to dress.
To-day, shaded by the buggy-top, in her dainty light blue lawn, with the
soft pink of her cheeks and her clear white brow and throat, she was a
most delicious thing to look upon in that hot summer street. Poor Lettie
suffered by contrast. Her cheeks were blazing, and her hair, wet with
perspiration, was adorned with a bow of bright purple ribbon tied
butterfly-fashion, and fastened on with a pin set with flashing
brilliants.
"Oh, Uncle Cam," Marjie cried, blushing like the pink rambler roses
climbing the tavern veranda, "Phil's just going out to look at some land
for his father. It's up the river somewhere and I'm going to hold the
ponies while he looks."
"Well, he'd ort to have somebody holdin' 'em fur him. I'll bet ye I'd
want a hostler if I had the lookin' to do. Land's a mighty small thing
an' hard to look at, sometimes; 'specially when a feller's head's in the
clouds an' he's walkin' on air. Goin' northwest? Look out, they's a
ha'nted house up there. But, by hen, I'd never see a ha'nt long's I had
somethin' better to look at."
I saw Lettie turn quickly and disappear around the corner. My father was
busy, so I sat in the office window and whistled and waited, watching
the ponies switch lazily at the flies.
When we were clear of town, and the open plain swept by the summer
breezes gave freedom from the heat, Marjie asked:
"Where is Lettie Conlow going on such a hot afternoon?"
"Nowhere, is she? She was talking to you at the courthouse."
"But she rushed away while Uncle Cam was joking, and I saw her cross the
alley back of the courthouse on Tell's pony, and in a minute she was
just flying up toward Cliff Street. She doesn't ride very well. I
thought she was afraid of that pony. But she was making it go sailing
out toward the bluff above town."
"Well, let her go, Marjie. She always wears on my nerves."
"Phil, she likes you, I know. Everybody knows."
"Well, I know and everybody knows that I never give her reason to. I
wish she would listen to Tell. I thought when I first came home they
were engaged."
"Before he went up to Wyandotte to work they were--he said so, anyhow."
Then we forgot Lettie. She wasn't necessary to us that day, for there
were only two in our world.
[Illustration: "Baronet, I think we are marching straight into Hell's
jaws"]
Out on the prairie trail a mile or more is the point where the bridle
path leading to the river turns northwest, and passing over a sidling
narrow way down the bluff, it follows the bottom lands upstream. As we
passed this point we did not notice Tell Mapleson's black pony just
making the top from the sidling bluff way, nor how quickly its rider
wheeled and headed back again down beyond sight of the level prairie
road. We had forgotten Lettie Conlow and everybody else.
The draw was the same old verdant ripple in the surface of the Plains.
The grasses were fresh and green. Toward the river the cottonwoods were
making a cool, shady way, delightfully refreshing in this summer
sunshine.
We did not hurry, for the draw was full of happy memories for us.
"I'll corral these bronchos up under the big cottonwood, and we'll
explore appurtenances down by the river later," I said. "Father says
every foot of the half-section ought to be viewed from that tree, except
what's in the little clump about the cabin."
We drove up to the open prairie again and let the horses rest in the
shade of this huge pioneer tree of the Plains. How it had escaped the
prairie fires through its years of sturdy growth is a marvel, for it
commanded the highest point of the whole divide. Its shade was delicious
after the glare of the trail.
For once the ponies seemed willing to stand quiet, and Marjie and I
looked long at the magnificent stretch of sky and earth. There were a
few white clouds overhead, deepening to a dull gray in the southwest.
All the sunny land was swathed in the midsummer yellow green, darkening
in verdure along the river and creeks, and in the deepest draws. Even as
we rested there the clouds rolled over the horizon's edge, piling higher
and higher, till they hid the afternoon sun, and the world was cool and
gray. Then down the land sped a summer shower; and the sweet damp odor
of its refreshing the south wind bore to us, who saw it all. Sheet
after sheet of glittering raindrops, wind-driven, swept across the
prairie, and the cool green and the silvery mist made a scene a master
could joy to copy.
I didn't forget my errand, but it was not until the afternoon was
growing late that we left the higher ground and drove down the shady
draw toward the river. The Neosho is a picture here, with still expanses
that mirror the trees along its banks, and stony shallows where the
water, even in midsummer, prattles merrily in the sunshine, as it
hurries toward the deep stillnesses.
We sat down in a cool, grassy space with the river before us, and the
green trees shading the little stone cabin beyond us, while down the
draw the vista of still sunlit plains was like a dream of beauty.
"Marjie,"--I took her hand in mine--"since you were a little girl I have
known you. Of all the girls here I have known you longest. In the two
years I was East I met many young ladies, both in school and at
Rockport. There were some charming young folks. One of them, Rachel
Melrose, was very pretty and very wealthy. Her mother made considerable
fuss over me, and I believe the daughter liked me a little; for she--but
never mind; maybe it was all my vanity. But, Marjie, there has never
been but one girl for me in all this world; there will never be but one.
If Jean Pahusca had carried you off--Oh, God in Heaven! Marjie, I wonder
how my father lived through the days after my mother lost her life. Men
do, I know."
I was toying with her hand. It was soft and beautifully formed, although
she knew the work of our Springvale households.
"Marjie," my voice was full of tenderness, "you are dear to me as my
mother was to my father. I loved you as my little playmate; I was fond
of you as my girl when I was first beginning to care for a girl as boys
will; as my sweetheart, when the liking grew to something more. And now
all the love a man can give, I give to you."
I rose up before her. They call me vigorous and well built to-day. I was
in my young manhood's prime then. I looked down at her, young and
dainty, with the sweet grace of womanhood adorning her like a garment.
She stood up beside me and lifted her fair face to mine. There was a
bloom on her cheeks and her brown eyes were full of peace. I opened my
arms to her and she nestled in them and rested her cheek against my
shoulder.
"Marjie," I said gently, "will you kiss me and tell me that you love
me?"
Her arms were about my neck a moment. Sometimes I can feel them there
now. All shy and sweet she lifted her lips to mine.
"I do love you, Phil," she murmured, and then of her own will, just
once, she kissed me.
"It is vouchsafed sometimes to know a bit of heaven here on earth," Le
Claire had said to me when he talked of O'mie's father.
It came to me that day; the cool, green valley by the river, the
vine-covered old stone cabin, the sunlit draw opening to a limitless
world of summer peace and beauty, and Marjie with me, while both of us
were young and we loved each other.
The lengthening shadows warned me at last.
"Well, I must finish up this investigation business of Judge Baronet's,"
I declared. "Come, here's a haunted house waiting for us. Father says it
hasn't been inhabited since the Frenchman left it. Are you afraid of
ghosts?"
We were going up a grass-grown way toward the little stone structure,
half buried in climbing vines and wild shrubbery.
"What a cunning place, Phil! It doesn't look quite deserted to me,
somehow. No, I'm not afraid of anything but Indians."
My arm was about her in a moment. She looked up laughing, but she did
not put it away.
"Why, there are no Indians here, Phil," and she looked out on the sunny
draw.
My face was toward the cabin. I was in a blissful waking dream, else I
should have taken quicker note. For sure as I had eyes, I caught a flash
of red between the far corner of the cabin and the thick underbrush
beyond it. It was just a narrow space, where one might barely pass,
between the corner of the little building and the surrounding shrubbery;
but for an instant, a red blanket with a white centre flashed across
this space, and was gone. So swift was its flight and so full was my
mind of the joy of living, I could not be sure I had seen anything. It
was just a twitch of the eyelid. What else could it be?
We pushed open the solid oak door, and stood inside the little room. The
two windows let in a soft green light. It was a rude structure of the
early Territorial days, made for shelter and warmth. There was a dark
little attic or loft overhead. A few pieces of furniture--a chair, a
table, a stone hearth by the fireplace, and a sort of cupboard--these,
with a strong, old worn chest, were all that the room held. Dust was
everywhere, as might have been expected. And yet Marjie was right. The
spirit of occupation was there.
"Do you know, Marjie, this cabin has hardly been opened since the poor
woman drowned herself in the river, down there. They found her body in
the Deep Hole. The Frenchman left the place, and it has been called
haunted. An Indian and a ghost can't live together. The race fears them
of all things. So the Indians would never come here."
"But look there, Phil!"--Marjie had not heeded my words--"there's a
stick partly burned, and these ashes look fresh." She was bending over
the big stone hearth.
As I started forward, my eye caught a bit of color behind the chair by
the table. I stooped to see a purple bow of ribbon, tied butterfly
fashion--Lettie Conlow's ribbon. I put it in my pocket, determined to
find out how it had found its way here.
"Ugh! Let's go," said Marjie, turning to me. "I'm cold in here. I'd want
a home up under the cottonwood, not down in this lonely place. Maybe
movers on the trail camp in here." Marjie was at the door now.
I looked about once more and then we went outside and stood on the
broad, flat step. The late afternoon was dreamily still here, and the
odor of some flowers, faint and woodsy, came from the thicket beside the
doorway.
"It is dreary in there, Marjie, but I'll always love this place outside.
Won't you?" I said, and with a lover's happiness in my face, I drew her
close to me.
She smiled and nodded. "I'll tell you all I think after a while. I'll
write it to you in a letter."
"Do, Marjie, and put it in our 'Rockport' post-office, just like we used
to do. I'll write you every day, too, and you'll find my letter in the
same old crevice. Come, now, we must go home."
"We'll come again." Marjie waved her hand to the silent gray cabin. And
slowly, as lovers will, we strolled down the walk and out into the open
where the ponies neighed a hurry-up call for home.
Somehow the joy of youth and hope drove fear and suspicion clear from my
mind, and with the opal skies above us and the broad sweet prairies
round about us for an eternal setting of peace and beauty, we two came
home that evening, lovers, who never afterwards might walk alone, for
that our paths were become one way wherein we might go keeping step
evermore together down the years.
CHAPTER XII
A MAN'S ESTATE
When I became a man I put away childish things.
The next day was the Sabbath. I was twenty-one that day. Marjie and I
sang in the choir, and most of the solo work fell to us. Dave Mead was
our tenor, and Bess Anderson at the organ sang alto. Dave was away that
day. His girl sweetheart up on Red Range was in her last illness then,
and Dave was at her bedside. Poor Dave! he left Springvale that Fall,
and he never came back. And although he has been honored and courted of
women, I have been told that in his luxurious bachelor apartments in
Hong Kong there is only one woman's picture, an old-fashioned
daguerreotype of a sweet girlish face, in an ebony frame.
Dr. Hemingway always planned the music to suit his own notions. What he
asked for we gave. On this Sabbath morning there was no surprise when he
announced, "Our tenor being absent, we will omit the anthem, and I shall
ask brother Philip and sister Marjory to sing Number 549, 'Oh, for a
Closer Walk with God.'"
He smiled benignly upon us. We were accustomed to his way, and we knew
everybody in that little congregation. And yet, somehow, a flutter went
through the company when we stood up together, as if everybody knew our
thoughts. We had stood side by side on Sabbath mornings and had sung
from the same book since childhood, with never a thought of
embarrassment. It dawned on Springvale that day as a revelation what
Marjie meant to me. All the world, including our town, loves a lover,
and it was suddenly clear to the town that the tall, broad-shouldered
young man who looked down at the sweet-browed little girl-woman beside
him as he looked at nobody else, whose hand touched hers as they turned
the leaves, and who led her by the arm ever so gently down the steps
from the choir seats, was reading for himself
That old fair story
Set round in glory
Wherever life is found.
And Marjie, in spotless white, with her broad-brimmed hat set back from
her curl-shaded forehead, the tinted lights from the memorial window
which Amos Judson had placed there for his wife, falling like an aureole
about her, who could keep from loving her?
"Her an' Phil Baronet's jist made fur one another," Cam Gentry declared
to a bunch of town gossips the next day.
"Now'd ye ever see a finer-lookin' couple?" broke in Grandpa Mead. "An'
the way they sung that hymn yesterday--well, I just hope they'll repeat
it over my remains." And Grandpa began to sing softly in his quavering
voice:
Oh, for a closer walk with God,
A cam and heavenli frame,
A light toe shine upon tha road
That leads me toe tha Lamb.
Everybody agreed with Cam except Judson. He was very cross with O'mie
that morning. O'mie was clerk and manager for him now, as Judson himself
had been for Irving Whately. He rubbed his hands and joined the group,
smiling a trifle scornfully.
"Seems to me you're all gossiping pretty freely this morning. The young
man may be pretty well fixed some day. But he's young, he's young. Mrs.
Whately's my partner, and I know their affairs very well, very well.
She'll provide her daughter with a man, not a mere boy."
"Well, he was man enough to keep this here town from burnin' up, an' no
tellin' how many bloodsheds," Grandpa Mead piped in.
"He was man enough to find O'mie and save his life," Cam protested.
"Well, we'll leave it to Dr. Hemingway," Judson declared, as the good
doctor entered the doorway. Judson paid liberally into the church fund
and accounted that his wishes should weigh much with the good minister.
"We--these people here--were just coupling the name of Marjory Whately
with that boy of Judge Baronet's. Now I know how Mrs. Whately is
circumstanced. She is peculiarly situated, and it seems foolish to even
repeat such gossip about this young man, this very young man, Philip."
The minister smiled upon the group serenely. He knew the life-purpose of
every member of it, and he could have said, as Kipling wrote of the
Hindoo people:
I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine;
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
"I never saw a finer young man and woman in my life," he said gently. "I
know nothing of their intentions--as yet. They haven't been to me," his
eyes twinkled, "but they are good to look upon when they stand up
together. Our opinions, however, will cut little figure in their
affairs. Heaven bless them and all the boys and girls! How soon they
grow to be men and women."
The good man made his purchase and left the store.
"But he's a young man, a very boy yet," Amos Judson insisted, unable to
hide his disappointment at the minister's answer.
The very boy himself walked in at that instant. Judson turned a scowling
face at O'mie, who was chuckling among the calicoes, and frowned upon
the group as if to ward off any further talk. I nodded good-morning and
went to O'mie.
"Aunt Candace wants some Jane P. Coats's thread, number 50 white, two
spools."
"That's J. & P. Coats, young man." Judson spoke more sharply than he
need to have done. "Goin' East to school doesn't always finish a boy;
size an' learnin' don't count," and he giggled.
I was whistling softly, "Oh, for a Closer Walk with God," and I turned
and smiled down on the little man. I was head and shoulders above him.
"No, not always. I can still learn," I replied good-naturedly, and went
whistling on my way to the courthouse.
I was in a good humor with all the world that morning. Out on "Rockport"
in the purple twilight of the Sabbath evening I had slipped my mother's
ring on Marjie's finger. I was on my way now for a long talk with my
father. I was twenty-one, a man in years, as I had been in spirit since
the night the town was threatened by the Rebel raiders--aye, even since
the day Irving Whately begged me to take care of Marjie. I had no time
to quarrel with the little widower.
"He's got the best of you, Judson," Cam declared. "No use to come,
second hand, fur a girl like that when a handsome young feller like Phil
Baronet, who's run things his own way in this town sence he was a little
feller, 's got the inside track. Why, the young folks, agged on by some
older ones, 'ud jist natcherly mob anybody that 'ud git in Phil's way of
whatever he wanted. Take my word, if he wants Marjie he kin have her;
and likewise take it, he does want her."
"An' then," Grandpa spoke with mock persuasion, "Amos, ye know ye've
been married oncet. An' ye're not so young an' ye're a leetle bald. D'ye
just notice Phil's hair, layin' in soft thick waves? Allers curled that
way sence he was a little feller."
Amos Judson went into an explosive combustion.
"I've treated my wife's memory and remains as good as a man ever did.
She's got the biggest stone in the cemet'ry, an' I've put a memorial
window in the church. An' what more could a man do? It's more than any
of you have done." Amos was too wrought up to reason.
"Well, I acknowledge," said Cam, "I've ben a leetle slack about gittin'
a grave-stun up fur Dollie, seein' she's still livin', but I have
threatened her time an' agin to put a winder to her memory in the church
an' git her in shape to legalize it if she don't learn how to git me up
a good meal. Darned poor cook my wife is."
"An' as for this boy," Judson broke in, not noticing Cam's joke, "as to
his looks," he stroked his slick light brown hair, "a little baldness
gives dignity, makes a man look like a man. Who'd want to have hair like
a girl's? But Mrs. Whately's too wise not to do well by her daughter.
She knows the value of a dollar, and a man makin' it himself."
"Well, why not set your cap fur the widder? You'd make a good father to
her child, an' Phil would jest na'chelly be proud of you for a
daddy-in-law." This from the stage driver, Dever, who had caught the
spirit of the game in hand. "Anyhow you'd orter seen them two young
folks meet when he first got back home, out there where the crowd of 'em
helt up the stage. Well, sir, she was the last to say 'howdy do.'
Everybody was lookin' the other way then, 'cept me, and I didn't have
sense enough. Well, sir, he jist took her hand like somethin' he'd been
reachin' fur about two year, an' they looked into each other's eyes,
hungry like, an' a sort of joy such as any of us 'ud long to possess
come into them two young faces. I tell you, if you're goin' to gossip
jist turn it onto Judson er me, but let them two alone."
Judson was too violently angry to be discreet.
"It's all silly scand'lous foolishness, and I won't hear another word of
it," he shouted.
Just as he spoke, Marjie herself came in. Judson stepped forward in an
officious effort to serve her, and unable to restrain himself, he called
out to O'mie, "Put four yards of towelling, twelve and a half cents a
yard, to Mrs. Whately's standing account."
It was not the words that offended, so much as the tone, the proprietary
sound, the sense of obligation it seemed to put upon the purchaser,
unrelieved by his bland smile and attempt at humor in his after remark,
"We don't run accounts with everybody, but I guess we can trust you."
It cut Marjie's spirit. A flush mounted to her cheeks, as she took her
purchase and hurried out of the door and plump into my father, who was
passing just then.
Judge Baronet was a man of courtly manners. He gently caught Marjie's
arm to steady her.
"Good-morning, Marjie. How is your mother to-day?"
The little girl did not speak for a moment. Her eyes were full of tears.
Presently she said, "May I come up to your office pretty soon? I want
to ask you something--something of our business matters."
"Yes, yes, come now," he replied, taking her bundle and putting himself
on the outer side of the walk. He had forgotten my appointment for the
moment.
When they reached the courthouse he said: "Just run into my room there;
I've got to catch Sheriff Karr before he gets away."
He opened the door of his private office, thrusting her gently inside,
and hurried away. I turned to meet my father, and there was Marjie. Tear
drops were on her long brown lashes, and her cheeks were flushed.
"Why, my little girl!" I exclaimed in surprise as she started to hurry
away.
"I didn't know you were in here; your father sent me in"--and then the
tears came in earnest.
I couldn't stand for that.
"What is it, Marjie?" I had put her in my father's chair and was bending
over her, my face dangerously near her cheek.
"It's Amos Judson--Oh, Phil, I can't tell you. I was going to talk to
your father."
"All right," I said gayly. "Ask papa. It's the proper thing. He must be
consulted, of course. But as to Judson, don't worry. O'mie promised me
just this morning to sew him up in a sack and throw him off the cliff
above the Hermit's Cave into the river. O'mie says it's safe; he's so
light he'll float."
Marjie smiled through her tears. A noise in the outer office reminded us
that some one was there, and that the outer door was half ajar. Then my
father came in. His face was kindly impenetrable.
"I had forgotten my son was here. Phil, take these papers over to the
county attorney's office. I'll call you later." He turned me out and
gave his attention to Marjie.
I loafed about the outer office until she and my father came out. He led
her to the doorway and down the steps with a courtesy he never forgot
toward women. When we were alone in his private office I longed to ask
Marjie's errand, but I knew my father too well.
"You wanted to see me, Phil?" He was seated opposite to me, his eyes
were looking steadily into mine, and clear beyond them down into my
soul.
"Yes, Father," I replied; "I am a man now--twenty-one years and one day
over. And there are a few things, as a man, I want to know and to have
you know."
He was sharpening a pencil carefully. "I'm listening," he said kindly.
"Well, Father--" I hesitated. It was so much harder to say than I had
thought it would be. I toyed with the tassel of the window cord
confusedly. "Father, you remember when you were twenty-one?"
"Yes, my son, I was just out of Harvard. And like you I had a father to
whom I went to tell him I was in love, just as you are. When your own
son comes to you some day, help him a little."
I felt a weight lifted from my mind. It was good of him to open the way.
"Father, I have never seen any other girl like Marjie."
"No, there isn't any--for you. But how about her?"
"I think, I know she--does care. I think--" I was making poor work of it
after all his help. "Well, she said she did, anyhow." I blurted out
defiantly.
"The court accepts the evidence," he remarked, and then more seriously
he went on: "My son, I am happy in your joy. I may have been a little
slow. There was much harmless coupling of her name with young
Tillhurst's while you were away. I did not give it much thought.
Letters from Rockport were also giving you and Rachel Melrose some
consideration. Rachel is an only child and pretty well fixed
financially."
"Oh, Father, I never gave her two thoughts."
"So the letters intimated, but added that the Melrose blood is
persistent, and that Rachel's mother was especially willing. She is of a
good family, old friends of Candace's and mine. She will have money in
her own right, is handsome and well educated. I thought you might be
satisfied there."
"But I don't care for her money nor anybody else's. Nobody but Marjie
will ever suit me," I cried.
"So I saw when I looked at you two in church yesterday. It was a
revelation, I admit; but I took in the situation at once." And then more
affectionately he added: "I was very proud of you, Phil. You and Marjie
made a picture I shall keep. When you want my blessing, I have part of
it in the strong box in my safe. All I have of worldly goods will be
yours, Phil, if you do it no dishonor; and as to my good-will, my son,
you are my wife's child, my one priceless treasure. When by your own
efforts you can maintain a home, nor feel yourself dependent, then bring
a bride to me. I shall do all I can to give you an opportunity. I hope
you will not wait long. When Irving Whately lay dying at Chattanooga he
told me his hopes for Marjie and you. But he charged me not to tell you
until you should of your own accord come to me. You have his blessing,
too."
How good he was to me! His hand grasped mine.
"Phil, let me say one thing; don't ever get too old to consult your
father. It may save some losses and misunderstandings and heart-aches.
And now, what else?"
"Father, when O'mie seemed to be dying, Le Claire told me something of
his story one evening. He said you knew it."
My father looked grave.
"How does this concern you, Phil?"
"Only in this. I promised Le Claire I would see that O'mie's case was
cared for if he lived and you never came back," I replied. "He is of age
now, and if he knows his rights he does not use them."
"Have you talked to O'mie of this?" he asked quickly.
"No, sir; I promised not to speak of it."
"Phil, did Le Claire suggest any property?"
"No, sir. Is there any?"
My father smiled. "You have a lawyer's nose," he said, "but fortunately
you can keep a still tongue. I'm taking care of O'mie's case right now.
By the way," he went on after a short pause. "I sent you out on an
errand Saturday. That's another difficult case, a land claim I'm trying
to prove for a party. There are two claimants. Tell Mapleson is the
counsel for the other one. It's a really dangerous case in some ways.
You were to go and spy out the land. What did you see? Anything except a
pretty girl?" My face was burning. "Oh, I understand. You found a place
out there to stand, and now you think you can move the world."
"I found something I want to speak of besides. Oh, well--I'm not ashamed
of caring for Marjie."
"No, no, my boy. You are right. You found the best thing in the world. I
found it myself once, by a moonlit sea, not on the summer prairie; but
it is the same eternal blessing. Now go on."
"Well, father, you said the place was uninhabited. But it isn't.
Somebody is about there now."
"Did you see any one, or is it just a wayside camp for movers going out
on the trail?"
"I am not sure that I saw any one, and yet--"
"Tell me all you know, and all you suspect, and why you have
conclusions," he said gravely.
"I caught just a glimpse, a mere flirt of a red blanket with a white
centre, the kind Jean Pahusca used to wear. It was between the corner of
the house and the hazel-brush thicket, as if some one were making for
the timber."
"Did you follow it?"
"N--no, I could hardly say I saw anything; but thinking about it
afterwards, I am sure somebody was getting out of sight."
"I see." My father looked straight at me. I knew his mind, and I blushed
and pulled at the tassel of the window cord. "Be careful. The county has
to pay for curtain fixtures. What else?"
"Well, inside the cabin there were fresh ashes and a half-burned stick
on the hearth. By a chair under the table I picked this up." I handed
him the bow of purple ribbon with the flashing pin.
"It must be movers, and as to that red flash of color, are you real sure
it was not just a part of the rose-hued world out there?" He smiled as
he spoke.
"Father, that bow was on Lettie Conlow's head not an hour before it was
lost out there. She found out where we were going, and she put out
northwest on Tell Mapleson's pony. She may have taken the river path. It
is the shortest way. Why should she go out there?"
"Do some thinking for yourself. You are a man now, twenty-one, and one
day over. You can unravel this part." He sat with impenetrable face,
waiting for me to speak.
"I do not know. Lettie Conlow has always been silly about--about the
boys. All the young folks say she likes me, has always liked me."
"How much cause have you given her? Be sure your memory is clear." My
father spoke sternly.
"Father," I stood before him now, "I am a man, as you say, and I have
come up through a boyhood no better nor worse than the other boys whom
you know here. We were a pretty decent gang even before you went away to
the War. After that we had to be men. But all these years, Father, there
has been only one girl for me. I never gave Lettie Conlow a ghost of a
reason for thinking I cared for her. But she is old Conlow's own child,
and she has a bitter, jealous nature."
"Well, what took her to the--to the old cabin out there?"
"I do not know. She may have been hidden out there to spy what we--I was
doing."
"Did she have on a red blanket too, Saturday afternoon?"
"Well, now I wonder--." My mind was in a whirl. Could she be in league
against me? What did it mean? I sat down to think.
"Father, there's something I've never yet understood about this town," I
burst out impetuously. "If it is to have anything to do with my future I
ought to know it. Father Le Claire would tell me only half his story.
You know more of O'mie than you will tell me. And here is a jealous girl
whose father consented to give Marjie to a brutal Indian out of hatred
for her father; and it is his daughter who trails me over the prairie
because I am with Marjie. Why not tell me now what you know?"
My father sat looking thoughtfully at me. At last he spoke.
"I know nothing of girls' love affairs and jealousies," he said; "pass
that now. I am O'mie's attorney and am trying to adjust his claims for
him as I can discover them. I cannot get hold of the case myself as I
should like. If Le Claire were here I might find out something."
"Or nothing," I broke in. "It would depend on circumstances."
"You are right. He has never told me all he knows, but I know much
without his telling."
"Do you know how Jean Pahusca came to carry a knife for years with the
name, 'Jean Le Claire,' cut in the blade? Do you know why the half-breed
and the priest came to look so much alike, same square-cut forehead,
same build, same gait, same proud way of throwing back the head? You've
only to look at them to see all this, except that with a little
imagination the priest's face would fit a saint and Jean's is a very
devil's countenance."
"I do not know the exact answer to any of these questions. They are
points for us to work out together now you are a man. Jean is in some
way bound to Le Claire. If by blood ties, why does the priest not own,
or entirely disown him? If not, why does the priest protect him?
"In some way, too, both are concerned with O'mie. Le Claire is eager to
protect the Irishman. I do not know where Jean is, but I believe
sometimes he is here in concealment. He and Tell Mapleson are
counselling together. I think he furnishes Tell with some booty, for
Tell is inordinately prosperous. I look at this from a lawyer's place.
You have grown up with the crowd here, and you see as a young man from
the social side, where personal motives count for much. Together we must
get this thing unravelled; and it may be in doing it some love matters
and some church matters may get mixed and need straightening. You must
keep me informed of every thing you know." He paused a moment, then
added: "I am glad you have let me know how it is with you, Phil. In your
life I can live my own again. Children do so bless us. Be happy in your
love, my boy. But be manly, too. There are some hard climbs before you
yet. Learn to bear and wait. Yours is an open sunlit way to-day. If the
shadows creep across it, be strong. They will lift again. Run home now
and tell Aunt Candace I'll be home at one o'clock. Tell her what you
have told me, too. She will be glad to know it."
"She does know it; she has known it ever since the night we came into
Springvale in 1854."
My father turned to the door. Then he put his arms about me and kissed
my forehead. "You have your mother's face, Phil." How full of tenderness
his tones were!
In the office I saw Judson moving restlessly before the windows. He had
been waiting there for some time, and he frowned on me as I passed him.
He was a man of small calibre. His one gift was that of money-getting.
By the careful management of the Whately store in the owner's absence he
began to add to his own bank account. With the death of Mr. Whately he
had assumed control, refusing to allow any investigation of affairs
until, to put it briefly, he was now in entire possession. Poor Mrs.
Whately hardly knew what was her own, while her husband's former clerk
waxed pompous and well-to-do. Being a vain man, he thought the best
should come to him in social affairs, and being a man of medium
intellect, he lacked self-control and tact.
This was the nature of the creature who strode into Judge Baronet's
private office, slamming the door behind him and presenting himself
unannounced. The windows front the street leading down to where the
trail crossed the river, and give a view of the glistening Neosho
winding down the valley. My father was standing by one of these windows
when Judson fired himself into the room. John Baronet's mind was not on
Springvale, nor on the river. His thoughts were of his son and of her
who had borne him, the sweet-browed woman whose image was in the
sacredest shrine of his heart.
Judson's advent was ill-timed, and his excessive lack of tact made the
matter worse.
"Mr. Baronet," he began pompously enough, "I must see you on a very
grave matter, very grave indeed."
Judge Baronet gave him a chair and sat down across the table from him to
listen. Judson had grated harshly on his mood, but he was a man of
poise.
"I'll be brief and blunt. That's what you lawyers want, ain't it?" The
little man giggled. "But I must advise this step at once as a necessary,
a very necessary one."
My father waited. Judson hadn't the penetration to feel embarrassed.
"You see it's like this. If you'll just keep still a minute I can show
you, though I ain't no lawyer; I'm a man of affairs, a commercialist, as
you would say. A producer maybe is a better term. In short, I'm a
money-maker."
My father smiled. "I see," he remarked. "I'll keep still. Go on."
"Well, now, I'm a widower that has provided handsome for my first wife's
remains. I've earned and paid for the right to forget her."
The great broad-shouldered, broad-minded man before the little boaster
looked down to hide his contempt.
"I've did my part handsome now, you'll admit; and being alone in the
world, with no one to enjoy my prosperity with me, I'm lonesome. That's
it, I'm lonesome. Ain't you sometimes?"
"Often," my father replied.
"Now I know'd it. We're in the same boat barring a great difference in
ages. Why, hang it, Judge, let's get married!" He giggled explosively
and so failed to see the stern face of the man before him.
"I want a young woman, a pretty girl, I've a right to a pretty girl, I
think. In fact, I want Marjory Whately. And what's more, I'm going to
have her. I've all but got the widder's consent now. She's under
considerable obligation to me."
Across John Baronet's mind there swept a picture of the Chattanooga
battle field. The roar of cannon, the smoke of rifles, the awful charge
on charge, around him. And in the very heart of it all, Irving Whately
wounded unto death, his hands grasping the Springvale flag, his voice
growing faint.
"You will look after them, John? Phil promised to take care of Marjie.
It makes this easier. I believe they will love each other, John. I hope
they may. When they do, give them my blessing. Good-bye." Across this
vision Judson's thin sharp voice was pouring out words.
"Now, Baronet, you see, to be plain, it's just this way. If I marry
Marjory, folks'll say I'm doing it to get control of the widder's stock.
It's small; but they'll say it."
"Why should it be small?" My father's voice was penetrating as a
knife-thrust. Judson staggered at it a little.
"Business, you know, management you couldn't understand. She's no hand
at money matters."
"So it seems," my father said dryly.
"But you'd not understand it. To resume. Folks'll say I'm trying to get
the whole thing, when all I really want is the girl, the girl now.
She'll not have much at best; and divided between her and her mother,
there'll be little left for Mrs. Whately to go on livin' on, with Mrs.
Judson's share taken out. Now, here's my point precisely, precisely. You
take the widder yourself. You need a wife, and Mrs. Whately's still
good-looking most ways. She was always a pretty, winsome-faced woman.
"You've got a plenty and getting more all the time. You could provide
handsome for her the rest of her life. You'd enjoy a second wife, an'
she'd be out of my way. You see it, don't you? I'll marry Marjie, an'
you marry her mother, kind of double wedding. Whew! but we'd make a fine
couple of grooms. What's in gray hair and baldness, anyhow? But there's
one thing I can't stand for. Gossip has begun to couple the name of your
boy with Miss Whately. Now he's just a very boy, only a year or two
older'n she, and nowise able to take care of her properly, you'll admit;
and it's silly. Besides, Conlow was telling me just an hour or more ago,
that Phil and Lettie was old-time sweethearts. I've nothing to do with
Phil's puppy love, however. I'm here to advise with you. Shall we clinch
the bargain now, or do you want to think about it a little while? But
don't take long. It's a little sudden maybe to you. It's been on my mind
since the day I got that memorial window in an' Marjory sang 'Lead
Kindly Light,' standing there in the light of it. It was a service for
my first wife sung by her that was to be my second, you might almost
say. Dr. Hemingway talked beautiful, too, just beautiful. But I've got
to go. Business don't bother you lawyers,"--he was growing very familiar
now,--"but us merchants has to keep a sharp eye to time. When shall I
call?" He rose briskly. "When shall I call?" he repeated.
My father rose up to his full height. His hands were clasped hard behind
his back. He did not lift his eyes to the expectant creature before him,
and the foxy little widower did not dream how near to danger he was.
With the self-control that was a part of John Baronet's character, he
replied in an even voice:
"You will come when I send for you."
That evening my father told me all that had taken place.
"You are a man now, and must stand up against this miserable cur. But
you must proceed carefully. No hot-headed foolishness will do. He will
misjudge your motives and mine, and he can plant some ugly seeds along
your way. Property is his god. He is daily defrauding the defenceless to
secure it. When I move against him it will be made to appear that I do
it for your sake. Put yourself into the place where, of your own
wage-earning power, you can keep a wife in comfort, not luxury yet. That
will come later, maybe. And then I'll hang this dog with a rope of his
own braiding. But I'll wait for that until you come fully into a man's
estate, with the power to protect what you love."