BEGINNING AGAIN
It matters not what fruit the hand may gather,
If God approves, and says, "This is the best."
It matters not how far the feet may wander,
If He says, "Go, and leave to Me the rest."
--ALBERT MACY.
I stood in the August twilight by the railway station in the little
frontier town of Salina, where the Union Pacific train had abandoned me
to my fate. Turning toward the unmapped, limitless Northwest, I suddenly
realized that I was at the edge of the earth now. Behind me were
civilization and safety. Beyond me was only a waste of gray nothingness.
Yet this was the world I had come hither to conquer. Here were the
spaces wherein I should find peace. I set my face with grim
determination to work now, out of the thing before me, a purpose that
controlled me.
Morton's claim was a far day's journey up the Saline Valley. It would be
nearly a week before I could find a man to drive me thither; so I
secured careful directions, and the next morning I left the town on foot
and alone. I did not mind the labor of it. I was as vigorous as a young
giant, fear of personal peril I had never known, and the love of
adventure was singing its siren's song to me. I was clad in the strong,
coarse garments, suited to the Plains. I was armed with two heavy
revolvers and a small pistol. Hidden inside of my belt as a last
defence was the short, sharp knife bearing Jean Le Claire's name in
script lettering.
I shall never forget the moment when a low bluff beyond a bend in the
Saline River shut off the distant town from my view and I stood utterly
alone in a wide, silent world, left just as God had made it. Humility
and uplift mingle in the soul in such a time and place. One question ran
back and forth across my mind: What conquering power can ever bring the
warmth of glad welcome to the still, hostile, impenetrable beauty of
these boundless plains?
"The air is full of spirits out here," I said to myself. "There is no
living thing in sight, and yet the land seems inhabited, just as that
old haunted cabin down on the Neosho seemed last June."
And then with the thought of that June day Memory began to play her
tricks on me and I cried out, "Oh, perdition take that stone cabin and
the whole Neosho Valley if that will make me forget it all!"
I strode forward along the silent, sunshiny way, with a thousand things
on my mind's surface and only one thought in its inner deeps. The sun
swung up the sky, and the thin August air even in its heat was light and
invigorating. The river banks were low and soft where the stream cuts
through the alluvial soil a channel many feet below the level of the
Plains. The day was long, but full of interest to me, who took its sight
as a child takes a new picture-book, albeit a certain sense of peril
lurked in the shadowing corners of my thought.
The August sun was low in the west when I climbed up the grassy slope to
Morton's little square stone cabin. It stood on a bold height
overlooking the Saline River. Far away in every direction the land
billows lay fold on fold. Treeless and wide they stretched out to the
horizon, with here and there a low elevation, and here and there the
faint black markings of scrubby bushes clinging to the bank of a stream.
The stream itself, now only a shallow spread of water, bore witness to
the fierce thirst of the summer sun. Up and down the Saline Valley only
a few scattered homesteads were to be seen, and a few fields of slender,
stunted corn told the story of the first struggle for conquest in a
beautiful but lonely and unfriendly land.
Morton was standing at the door of his cabin looking out on that sweep
of plains with thoughtful eyes. He did not see me until I was fairly up
the hill, and when he did he made no motion towards me, but stood and
waited for my coming. In those few moments as I swung forward
leisurely--for I was very tired now--I think we read each other's
character and formed our estimates more accurately than many men have
done after years of close business association.
He was a small man beside me, as I have said, and his quiet manner, and
retiring disposition, half dignity, half modesty, gave the casual
acquaintance no true estimate of his innate force. Three things,
however, had attracted me to him in our brief meeting at Topeka: his
voice, though low, had a thrill of power in it; his hand-clasp was firm
and full of meaning; and when I looked into his blue eyes I recalled the
words which the Earl of Kent said to King Lear:
"You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master."
And when King Lear asked, "What's that?" Kent replied, "Authority."
[Illustration: Every movement of ours had been watched by Indian scouts]
It was in Morton's face. Although he was not more than a dozen years my
senior, I instinctively looked upon him as a leader of men, and he
became then and has always since been one of my manhood's ideals.
"I'm glad to see you, Baronet. Come in." He grasped my hand firmly and
led the way into the house. I sat down wearily in the chair he offered
me. It was well that I had walked the last stage of my journey. Had I
been twenty-four hours later I should have missed him, and this one
story of the West might never have been told.
The inside of the cabin was what one would expect to find in a
Plainsman's home who had no one but himself to consider.
While I rested he prepared our supper. Disappointment in love does not
always show itself in the appetite, and I was as hungry as a coyote. All
day new sights and experiences had been crowding in upon me. The
exhilaration of the wild Plains was beginning to pulse in my veins. I
had come into a strange, untried world. The past, with its broken ties
and its pain and loss, must be only a memory that at my leisure I might
call back; but here was a different life, under new skies, with new
people. The sunset lights, the gray evening shadows, and the dip and
swell of the purple distances brought their heartache; but now I was
hungry, and Morton was making johnny cakes and frying bacon; wild plums
were simmering on the fire, and coffee was filling the room with the
rarest of all good odors vouchsafed to mortal sense.
At the supper table my host went directly to my case by asking, "Have
you come out here to prospect or to take hold?"
"To take hold," I answered.
"Are you tired after your journey?" he queried.
"I? No. A night's sleep will fix me." I looked down at my strong arms,
and stalwart limbs.
"You sleep well?" His questions were brief.
"I never missed but one night in twenty-one years, except when I sat up
with a sick boy one Summer," I replied.
"When was that one night?"
"Oh, during the war when the border ruffians and Copperheads terrorized
our town."
"You are like your father, I see." He did not say in what particular;
and I added, "I hope I am."
We finished the meal in silence. Then we sat down by the west doorway
and saw the whole Saline Valley shimmer through the soft glow of
twilight and lose itself at length in the darkness that folded down
about it. A gentle breeze swept along from somewhere in the far
southwest, a thousand insects chirped in the grasses. Down by the river
a few faint sounds of night birds could be heard, and then loneliness
and homesickness had their time, denied during every other hour of the
twenty-four.
After a time my host turned toward me in the gloom and looked steadily
into my eyes.
"He's taking my measure," I thought.
"Well," I said, "will I do?"
"Yes," he answered. "Your father told me once in the army that his boy
could ride like a Comanche, and turn his back to a mark and hit it over
his shoulder." He smiled.
"That's because one evening I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put
up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of
his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to
do both at once, although we never had any shooting to do that really
counted."
"Baronet"--there was a tone in Morton's voice that gripped and held
me--"you have come here in a good time. We need you now. Men of your
build and endurance and skill are what this West's got to have."
"Well, I'm here," I answered seriously.
"I shall leave for Fort Harker to-morrow with a crowd of men from the
valley to join a company Sheridan has called for," he went on. "You know
about the Indian raid the first of this month. The Cheyennes came across
here, and up on Spillman Creek and over on the Solomon they killed a
dozen or more people. They burned every farm-house, and outraged every
woman, and butchered every man and child they could lay hands on. You
heard about it at Topeka."
"Hasn't that Indian massacre been avenged yet?" I cried.
Clearly in my memory came the two women of my dream of long ago. How
deeply that dream had impressed itself upon my mind! And then there
flashed across my brain the image of Marjie, as she looked the night
when she stood in the doorway with the lamplight on her brown curls, and
it became clear to me that she was safe at home. Oh, the joy of that
moment! The unutterable thankfulness that filled my soul was matched in
intensity only by the horror that fills it even now when I think of a
white woman in Indian slave-bonds. And while I was thinking of this I
was listening to Morton's more minute account of what had been taking
place about him, and why he and his neighbors were to start on the next
day for Fort Harker down on the Smoky Hill River.
Early in that memorable August of 1868 a band of forty Cheyenne braves,
under their chief Black Kettle, came riding up from their far-away
villages in the southwest, bent on a merciless murdering raid upon the
unguarded frontier settlements. They were a dirty, ragged, sullen crew
as ever rode out of the wilderness. Down on the Washita River their own
squaws and papooses were safe in their tepees too far from civilization
for any retaliatory measure to reach them.
When Black Kettle's band came to Fort Hays, after the Indian custom they
made the claim of being "good Indians."
"Black Kettle loves his white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad
when he meets them," the Chief declared. "We would be like white
soldiers, but we cannot, for we are Indians; but we can all be brothers.
It is a long way that we have come to see you. Six moons have come and
gone, and there has been no rain; the wind blows hot from the south all
day and all night; the ground is hot and cracked; the grass is burned
up; the buffalo wallows are dry; the streams are dry; the game is
scarce; Black Kettle is poor, and his band is hungry. He asks the white
soldiers for food for his braves and their squaws and papooses. All
other Indians may take the war-trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep
friendship with his white brothers."
Such were his honeyed words. The commander of the fort issued to each
brave a bountiful supply of flour and bacon and beans and coffee. Beyond
the shadow of the fort they feasted that night. The next morning they
had disappeared, these loving-hearted, loyal Indians, over whom the home
missionary used to weep copious tears of pity. They had gone--but
whither? Black Kettle and his noble braves were not hurrying southward
toward their squaws and papooses with the liberal supplies issued to
them by the Government. Crossing to the Saline Valley, not good Indians,
but a band of human fiends, they swept down on the unsuspecting
settlements. A homestead unprotected by the husband and father was
their supreme joy. Then before the eyes of the mother, little children
were tortured to death, while the mother herself--God pity her--was not
only tortured, but what was more cruel, was kept alive.
Across the Saline Valley, over the divide, and up the Solomon River
Valley this band of demons pushed their way. Behind them were hot ashes
where homes had been, and putrid, unburied bodies of murdered men and
children, mutilated beyond recognition. On their ponies, bound hand and
foot, were wretched, terror-stricken women. The smiling Plains lay
swathed in the August sunshine, and the richness of purple twilights,
and of rose-hued day dawns, and the pitiless noontime skies of brass
only mocked them in their misery. Did a merciful God forget the Plains
in those days of prairie conquest? No force rose up to turn Black Kettle
and his murderous horde back from the imperilled settlements until
loaded with plunder, their savage souls sated with cruelty, with
helpless captives for promise of further fiendish sport, they headed
southward and escaped untouched to their far-away village in the
pleasant, grassy lands that border the Washita River.
Not all their captives went with them, however. With these "good
Indians," recipients of the Fort Hays bounty, were two women, mothers of
a few months, not equal to the awful tax of human endurance. These,
bound hand and foot, they staked out on the solitary Plains under the
blazing August skies, while their tormentors rode gayly away to join
their fat, lazy squaws awaiting them in the southland by the winding
Washita.
This was the story Morton was telling to me as we sat in the dusk by his
cabin door. This was the condition of those fair Kansas River valleys,
for the Cheyennes under Black Kettle were not the only foes here. Other
Cheyenne bands, with the Sioux, the Brules, and the Dog Indians from
every tribe were making every Plains trail a warpath.
"The captives are probably all dead by this time; but the crimes are not
avenged, and the settlers are no safer than they were before the raid,"
Morton was saying. "Governor Crawford and the Governor of Colorado have
urged the authorities at Washington to protect our frontier, but they
have done nothing. Now General Sheridan has decided to act anyhow. He
has given orders to Colonel George A. Forsyth of the U. S. Cavalry, to
make up a company of picked men to go after the Cheyennes at once. There
are some two hundred of them hiding somewhere out in the Solomon or the
Republican River country. It is business now. No foolishness. A lot of
us around here are going down to Harker to enlist. Will you go with us,
Baronet? It's no boys' play. The safety of our homes is matched against
the cunning savagery of the redskins. We paid fifteen million dollars
for this country west of the Mississippi. If these Indians aren't driven
out and made to suffer, and these women's wrongs avenged, we'd better
sell the country back to France for fifteen cents. But it's no easy
piece of work. Those Cheyennes know these Plains as well as you know the
streets of Springvale. They are built like giants, and they fight like
demons. Don't underestimate the size of the contract. I know John
Baronet well enough to know that if his boy begins, he won't quit till
the battle is done. I want you to go into this with your eyes open.
Whoever fights the Indians must make his will before the battle begins.
Forsyth's company will be made up of soldiers from the late war,
frontiersmen, and scouts. You're not any one of these, but--" he
hesitated a little--"when I heard your speech at Topeka I knew you had
the right metal. Your spirit is in this thing. You are willing to pay
the price demanded here for the hearthstones of the West."
My spirit! My blood was racing through every artery in leaps and bounds.
Here was a man calmly setting forth the action that had been my very
dream of heroism, and here was a call to duty, where duty and ideal
blend into one. And then I was young, and thought myself at the
beginning of a new life; pain of body was unknown to me; the lure of the
Plains was calling to me--daring adventure, the need for courage, the
patriotism that fires the young man's heart, and, at the final analysis,
my loyalty to the defenceless, my secret notions of the value of the
American home, my horror of Indian captivity, a horror I had known when
my mind was most impressible--all these were motives driving me on. I
wondered that my companion could be so calm, sitting there in the dim
twilight explaining carefully what lay before me; and yet I felt the
power of that calmness building up a surer strength in me. I did not
dream of home that night. I chased Indians until I wakened with a
scream.
"What's the matter, Baronet?" Morton asked.
"I thought the Cheyennes had me," I answered sleepily.
"Don't waste time in dreaming it. Better go to sleep and let 'em alone,"
he advised; and I obeyed.
The next morning we were joined by half a dozen settlers of that
scattered community, and together we rode across the Plains toward Fort
Harker. I had expected to find a fortified stronghold at the end of our
ride. Something in imposing stone on a commanding height. Something of
frowning, impenetrable strength. Out on the open plain by the lazy,
slow-crawling Smoky Hill River were low buildings forming a quadrangle
about a parade ground. Officers' quarters, soldiers' barracks, and
stables for the cavalry horses and Government mules, there were, but no
fortifications were there anywhere. Yet the fort was ample for the needs
of the Plains. The Indian puts up only a defensive fight in the region
of Federal power. It is out in the wide blank lands where distance mocks
at retreat that he leads out in open hostility against the white man.
Here General Sheridan had given Colonel Forsyth commission to organize a
Company of Plainsmen. And this Company was to drive out or annihilate
the roving bands of redskins who menaced every home along the
westward-creeping Kansas frontier in the years that followed the Civil
War. It was to offer themselves to this cause that the men from Morton's
community, whom I had joined, rode across the divide from the Saline
Valley on that August day, and came in the early twilight to the
solitary unpretentious Federal post on the Smoky Hill.
It is only to a military man in the present time that this picture of
Fort Harker would be interesting, and there is nothing now in all that
peaceful land to suggest the frontier military station which I saw on
that summer day, now nearly four decades ago. But everything was
interesting to me then, and my greatest study was the men gathered there
for a grim and urgent purpose. My impression of frontiersmen had been
shaped by the loud threats, the swagger, and much profanity of the
border people of the Territorial and Civil War days. Here were quiet men
who made no boasts. Strong, wiry men they were, tanned by the sun of the
Plains, their hands hardened, their eyes keen. They were military men
who rode like centaurs, scouts who shot with marvellous accuracy, and
the sturdy settlers, builders of empire in this stubborn West. Had I
been older I would have felt my own lack of training among them. My
hands, beside theirs, were soft and white, and while I was accounted a
good marksman in Springvale I was a novice here. But since the night
long ago when Jean Pahusca frightened Marjie by peering through our
schoolroom window I had felt myself in duty bound to drive back the
Indians. I had a giant's strength, and no Baronet was ever seriously
called a coward.
The hours at Fort Barker were busy ones for Colonel Forsyth and
Lieutenant Fred Beecher, first in command under him. Their task of
selecting men for the expedition was quickly performed. My heart beat
fast when my own turn came. Forsyth's young lieutenant was one of the
Lord's anointed. Soft-voiced, modest, handsome, with a nature so
lovable, I find it hard to-day to think of him in the military ranks
where war and bloodshed are the ultimate business. But young Beecher was
a soldier of the highest order, fearless and resourceful. I cannot say
how much it lay in Morton's recommendation, and how much in the
lieutenant's kind heart that I was able to pass muster and be written
into that little company of less than threescore picked men. The
available material at Fort Harker was quickly exhausted, and the men
chosen were hurried by trains to Fort Hays, where the remainder of the
Company was made up.
Dawned then that morning in late Summer when we moved out from the Fort
and fronted the wilderness. On the night before we started I wrote a
brief letter to Aunt Candace, telling her what I was about to do.
"If I never come back, auntie," I added, "tell the little girl down on
the side of the hill that I tried to do for Kansas what her father did
for the nation, that I gave up my life to establish peace. And tell
her, too, if I really do fall out by the way, that I'll be lonely even
in heaven till she comes."
But with the morning all my sentiment vanished and I was eager for the
thing before me. Two hundred Indians we were told we should find and
every man of us was accounted good for at least five redskins. At
sunrise on the twenty-ninth day of August in the year of our Lord 1868,
Colonel Forsyth's little company started on its expedition of defence
for the frontier settlements, and for just vengeance on the Cheyennes of
the plains and their allied forces from kindred bands. Fort Hays was the
very outpost of occupation. To the north and west lay a silent, pathless
country which the finger of the white man had not touched. We knew we
were bidding good-bye to civilization as we marched out that morning,
were turning our backs on safety and comfort and all that makes life
fine. Before us was the wilderness, with its perils and lonely
desolation and mysteries.
But the wilderness has a siren's power over the Anglo-Saxon always. The
strange savage land was splendid even in its silent level sweep of
distance. When I was a boy I used to think that the big cottonwood
beyond the West Draw was the limit of human exploration. It marked the
world's western bound for me. Here were miles on miles of landscape
opening wide to more stretches of leagues and leagues of far boundless
plains, and all of it was weird, unconquerable, and very beautiful. The
earth was spread with a carpet of gold splashed with bronze and scarlet
and purple, with here and there a shimmer of green showing through the
yellow, or streaking the shallow waterways. Far and wide there was not a
tree to give the eye a point of attachment; neither orchard nor forest
nor lonely sentinel to show that Nature had ever cherished the land for
the white man's home and joy. The buffalo herd paid little heed to our
brave company marching out like the true knights of old to defend the
weak and oppressed. The gray wolf skulked along in the shadows of the
draws behind us and at night the coyotes barked harshly at the invading
band. But there was no mark of civilized habitation, no friendly hint
that aught but the unknown and unconquerable lay before us.
I was learning quickly in those days of marching and nights of dreamless
sleep under sweet, health-giving skies. After all, Harvard had done me
much service; for the university training, no less than the boyhood on
the Territorial border, had its part in giving me mental discipline for
my duties now. Camp life came easy to me, and I fell into the soldier
way of thinking, more readily than I had ever hoped to do.
On we went, northward to the Saline Valley, and beyond that to where the
Solomon River winds down through a region of summer splendor, its
rippling waves of sod a-tint with all the green and gold and russet and
crimson hues of the virgin Plains, while overhead there arched the sky,
tenderly blue in the morning, brazen at noonday, and pink and gray and
purple in the evening lights. But we found no Indians, though we
followed trail on trail. Beyond the Solomon we turned to the southwest,
and the early days of September found us resting briefly at Fort
Wallace, near the western bound of Kansas.
The real power that subdues the wilderness may be, nay, is, the spirit
of the missionary, but the mark of military occupation is a tremendous
convincer of truth. The shotgun and the Bible worked side by side in the
conquest of the Plains; the smell of powder was often the only incense
on the altars, and human blood was sprinkled for holy water. Fort
Wallace, with the Stars and Stripes afloat, looked good to me after
that ten days in the trackless solitude. And yet I was disappointed, for
I thought our quest might end here with nothing to show in results for
our pains. I did not know Forsyth and his band, as the next twenty days
were to show me.
While we were resting at the Fort, scouts brought in the news of an
Indian attack on a wagon train a score of miles eastward, and soon we
were away again, this time equipped for the thing in hand, splendidly
equipped, it seemed, for what we should really need to do. We were all
well mounted, and each of us carried a blanket, saddle, bridle,
picket-pin, and lariat; each had a haversack, a canteen, a butcher
knife, a tin plate and tin cup. We had Spencer rifles and Colt's
revolvers, with rounds of ammunition for both; and each of us carried
seven days' rations. Besides this equipment the pack mules bore a large
additional store of ammunition, together with rations and hospital
supplies.
Northward again we pushed, alert for every faint sign of Indians. Those
keen-eyed scouts were a marvel to me. They read the ground, the streams,
the sagebrush, and the horizon as a primer set in fat black type. Leader
of them, and official guide, was a man named Grover, who could tell by
the hither side of a bluff what was on the farther side. But for five
days the trails were illusive, finally vanishing in a spread of faint
footprints radiating from a centre telling us that the Indians had
broken up and scattered over separate ways. And so again we seemed to
have been deceived in this unmapped land.
We were beyond the Republican River now, in the very northwest corner of
Kansas, and the thought of turning back toward civilization had come to
some of us, when a fresh trail told us we were still in the Indian
country. We headed our horses toward the southwest, following the trail
that hugged the Republican River. It did not fade out as the others had
done, but grew plainer each mile.
The whole command was in a fever of expectancy. Forsyth's face was
bright and eager with the anticipation of coming danger. Lieutenant
Beecher was serious and silent, while the guide, Sharp Grover, was alert
and cool. A tenseness had made itself felt throughout the command. I
learned early not to ask questions; but as we came one noon upon a broad
path leading up to the main trail where from this union we looked out on
a wide, well-beaten way, I turned an inquiring face toward Morton, who
rode beside me. There was strength in the answer his eyes gave mine. He
had what the latter-day students of psychology call "poise," a grip on
himself. It is by such men that the Plains have been won from a desert
demesne to fruitful fields.
"I gave you warning it was no boy's play," he said simply.
I nodded and we rode on in silence. We pressed westward to where the
smaller streams combine to form the Republican River. The trail here led
us up the Arickaree fork, a shallow stream at this season of the year,
full of sand-bars and gravelly shoals. Here the waters lost themselves
for many feet in the underflow so common in this land of aimless,
uncertain waterways.
On the afternoon of the sixteenth of September the trail led to a little
gorge through which the Arickaree passes in a narrower channel. Beyond
it the valley opened out with a level space reaching back to low hills
on the north, while an undulating plain spread away to the south. The
grass was tall and rank in this open space, which closed in with a bluff
a mile or more to the west. Although it was hardly beyond midafternoon,
Colonel Forsyth halted the company, and we went into camp. We were
almost out of rations. Our horses having no food now, were carefully
picketed out to graze at the end of their lariats. A general sense of
impending calamity pervaded the camp. But the Plainsmen were accustomed
to this kind of thing, and the Civil War soldiers had learned their
lesson at Gettysburg and Chickamauga and Malvern Hill. I was the green
hand, and I dare say my anxiety was greater than that of any other one
there. But I had a double reason for apprehension.
As we had come through the little gorge that afternoon, I was riding
some distance in the rear of the line. Beside me was a boy of eighteen,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, his cheek as smooth as a girl's. His trim little
figure, clad in picturesque buckskin, suggested a pretty actor in a Wild
West play. And yet this boy, Jack Stillwell, was a scout of the
uttermost daring and shrewdness. He always made me think of Bud
Anderson. I even missed Bud's lisp when he spoke.
"Stillwell," I said in a low tone as we rode along, "tell me what you
think of this. Aren't we pretty near the edge? I've felt for three days
as if an Indian was riding beside me and I couldn't see him. It's not
the mirage, and I'm not locoed. Did you ever feel as if you were near
somebody you couldn't see?"
The boy turned his fair, smooth face toward mine and looked steadily at
me.
"You mustn't get to seein' things," he murmured. "This country turns
itself upside down for the fellow who does that. And in Heaven's name we
need every man in his right senses now. What do I think? Good God,
Baronet! I think we are marching straight into Hell's jaws. Sandy knows
it"--"Sandy" was Forsyth's military pet name--"but he's too set to back
out now. Besides, who wants to back out? or what's to be gained by it?
We've come out here to fight the Cheyennes. We're gettin' to 'em, that's
all. Only there's too damned many of 'em. This trail's like the old
Santa Fe Trail, wide enough for a Mormon church to move along. And as to
feelin' like somebody's near you, it's more 'n feelin'; it's fact.
There's Injuns on track of this squad every minute. I'm only eighteen,
but I've been in the saddle six years, and I know a few things without
seein' 'em. Sharp Grover knows, too. He's the doggondest scout that ever
rode over these Plains. He knows the trap we've got into. But he's like
Sandy, come out to fight, and he'll do it. All we've got to do is to
keep our opinions to ourselves. They don't want to be told nothin'; they
know."
The remainder of the company was almost out of sight as we rounded the
shoulder of the gorge. The afternoon sunlight dazzled me. Lifting my
eyes just then I saw a strange vision. What I had thought to be only a
piece of brown rock, above and beyond me, slowly rose to almost a
sitting posture before my blinking eyes, and a man, no, two men, seemed
to gaze a moment after our retreating line of blue-coats. It was but an
instant, yet I caught sight of two faces. Stillwell was glancing
backward at that moment and did not see anything. At the sound of our
horses' feet on the gravel the two figures changed to brown rock again.
In the moment my eye had caught the merest glint of sunlight on an
artillery bugle, a gleam, and nothing more.
"What's the matter, Baronet? You're white as a ghost. Are you scared or
sick?" Stillwell spoke in a low voice. We didn't do any shouting in
those trying days.
"Neither one," I answered, but I had cause to wonder whether I was
insane or not. As I live, and hope to keep my record clear, the two
figures I had seen were not strangers to me. The smaller of the two had
the narrow forehead and secretive countenance of the Reverend Mr. Dodd.
In his hand was an artillery bugle. Beyond him, though he wore an Indian
dress, rose the broad shoulders and square, black-shadowed forehead of
Father Le Claire.
"It is the hallucination of this mirage-girt land," I told myself. "The
Plains life is affecting my vision, and then the sun has blinded me. I'm
not delirious, but this marching is telling on me. Oh, it is at a
fearful price that the frontier creeps westward, that homes are planted,
and peace, blood-stained, abides with them."
So I meditated as I watched the sun go down on that September night on
the far Colorado Plains by the grassy slopes and yellow sands and thin,
slow-moving currents of the Arickaree.