THE SUNLIGHT ON OLD GLORY
The little green tent is made of sod,
And it is not long, and it is not broad,
But the soldiers have lots of room.
And the sod is a part of the land they saved,
When the flag of the enemy darkly waved,
A symbol of dole and gloom.
--WALT MASON.
"Baronet, we must have that spade we left over there this morning. Are
you the man to get it?" Sharp Grover said to me just after dusk. "We've
got to have water or die, and Burke here can't dig a well with his toe
nails, though he can come about as near to it as anybody." Burke was an
industrious Irishman who had already found water for us. "And then we
must take care of these." He motioned toward a still form at my feet,
and his tone was reverent.
"Over there" was the camp ground of the night before. It had been
trampled by hundreds of feet. Our camp was small, and finding the spade
by day might be easy enough. To grope in the dark and danger was another
matter. Twenty-four hours before, I would not have dared to try. Nothing
counted with me now. I had just risen from the stiffening body of a
comrade whom I had been trying to compose for his final rest. I had no
more sentiment for myself than I had for him. My time might come at any
moment.
"Yes, sir, I'll go," I answered the scout, and I felt of my revolvers;
my own and the one I had taken from the man who lay at my feet.
"Well, take no foolish chances. Come back if the way is blocked, but get
the spade if you can. Take your time. You'd better wait an hour than be
dead in a minute," and he turned to the next work before him.
He was guide, commander, and lieutenant all in one, and his duties were
many. I slipped out in the danger-filled shadows toward our camping
place of the night before. Every step was full of peril. The Indians had
no notion of letting us slip through their fingers in the dark. Added to
their day's defeats, we had slain their greatest warrior, and they would
have perished by inches rather than let us escape now. So our island was
guarded on every side. The black shadowed Plains were crossed and
re-crossed by the braves silently gathering in their lost ones for
burial. My scalp would have been a joy to them who had as yet no human
trophy to gloat over. Surely a spade was never so valuable before. My
sense of direction is fair and to my great relief I found that precious
implement marvellously soon, but the creek lay between me and the
island. Just at its bank I was compelled to drop into a clump of weeds
as three forms crept near me and straightened themselves up in the
gloom. They were speaking in low tones, and as they stood upright I
caught their words.
"You made that bugle talk, anyhow, Dodd."
So Dodd was the renegade whom I had heard three times in the conflict.
My vision at the gorge was not the insanity of the Plains, after all. I
was listening ravenously now. The man who had spoken stood nearest me.
There was a certain softness of accent and a familiar tone in his
speech. As he turned toward the other two, even in the dim light, the
outline of his form and the set of his uncovered head I knew.
"That's Le Claire, as true as heaven, all but the voice," I said to
myself. "But I'll never believe that metallic ring is the priest's. It
is Le Claire turned renegade, too, or it's a man on a pattern so like
him, they couldn't tell themselves apart."
I recalled all the gentleness and manliness of the Father. Never an act
of his was cruel, or selfish, or deceptive. True to his principles, he
had warned us again and again not to trust Jean. And yet he had always
seemed to protect the boy, always knew his comings and goings, and the
two had grown yearly to resemble each other more and more in face and
form and gesture. Was Le Claire a villain in holy guise?
I did not meditate long, for the third man spoke. Oh, the "good Indian"!
Never could he conceal his voice from me.
"Now, what I want you to do is to tell them all which one he is. I've
just been clear around their hole in the sand. I could have hit my
choice of the lot. But he wasn't there."
No, I had just stepped out after the spade.
"If he had been, I'd have shot him right then, no matter what come next.
But I don't want him shot. He's mine. Now tell every brave to leave him
to me, the big one, nearly as big as Roman Nose, whiter than the others,
because he's not been out here long. But he's no coward. The one with
thick dark curly hair; it would make a beautiful scalp. But I want him."
"What will you do with him?" the man nearest to me queried.
"Round the bend below the gorge the Arickaree runs over a little strip
of gravel with a ripple that sounds just like the Neosho above the Deep
Hole. I'll stake him out there where he can hear it and think of home
until he dies. And before I leave him I've got a letter to read to him.
It'll help to keep Springvale in his mind if the water fails. I've
promised him what to expect when he comes into my country."
"Do it," the smallest of the three spoke up. "Do it. It'll pay him for
setting Bud Anderson on me and nearly killing me in the alley back of
the courthouse the night we were going to burn up Springvale. I was
making for the courthouse to get the papers to burn sure. I'd got the
key and could have got them easy--and there's some needed burning
specially--when that lispin' tow-head caught my arm and gave my head
such a cut that I'll always carry the scar, and twisted my wrist so I've
never been able to lift anything heavier than an artillery bugle since.
Nobody ever knew it back there but Mapleson and Conlow and Judson. Funny
nobody ever guessed Judson's part in that thing except his wife, and she
kept it to herself and broke her heart and died. Everybody else said he
was water-bound away from home. He wasn't twenty feet from his own house
when the Whately girl come out. He was helpin' Jean then. Thought her
mother'd be killed, and Whately'd never get home alive--as he
didn't--and he'd get the whole store; greediest man on earth for money.
He's got the store anyhow, now, and he's going to marry the girl he was
helpin' Jean to take out of his way. That store never would have been
burnt that night. I wish Jean had got her, though. Then I'd turned
things against Tell Mapleson and run him out of town instead of his
driving me from Springvale. Tell played a double game damned well. I'm
outlawed and he's gettin' richer every day at home."
So spoke the Rev. Mr. Dodd, pastor of the Methodist Church South. It
may be I needed the discipline of that day's fighting to hold me
motionless and silent in the clump of grass beside these three men.
"Well, let's get up there and watch the fool women cry for their men."
It was none other than Father Le Claire's form before me, but this man's
voice was never that soft French tone of the good man's--low and
musical, matching his kindly eyes and sweet smile. As the three slipped
away I did the only foolish act of mine in the whole campaign: I rose
from my hiding place, shouldered that spade, and stalked straight down
the bank, across the creek, and up to our works in the centre of the
island as upright and free as if I were walking up Cliff Street to Judge
Baronet's front door. Jean's words had put into me just what I
needed--not acceptance of the inevitable, but a power of resistance, the
indomitable spirit that overcomes.
History is stranger than fiction, and the story of the Kansas frontier
is more tragical than all the Wild West yellow-backed novels ever turned
off the press. To me this campaign of the Arickaree has always read like
a piece of bloody drama, so terrible in its reality, it puts the
imagination out of service.
We had only one chance for deliverance, we must get the tidings of our
dreadful plight to Fort Wallace, a hundred miles away. Jack Stillwell
and another brave scout were chosen for the dangerous task. At midnight
they left us, moving cautiously away into the black blank space toward
the southwest, and making a wide detour from their real line of
direction. The Indians were on the alert, and a man must walk as
noiselessly as a panther to slip between their guards.
The scouts wore blankets to resemble the Indians more closely in the
shadows of the night. They made moccasins out of boot tops, that their
footprints might tell no story. In sandy places they even walked
backward that they should leave no tell-tale trail out of the valley.
Dawn found them only three miles away from their starting place. A
hollow bank overhung with long, dry grasses, and fronted with rank
sunflowers, gave them a place of concealment through the daylight hours.
Again on the second night they hurried cautiously forward. The second
morning they were near an Indian village. Their only retreat was in the
tall growth of a low, marshy place. Here they crouched through another
long day. The unsuspecting squaws, hunting fuel, tramped the grasses
dangerously near to them, but a merciful Providence guarded their
hiding-place.
On the third night they pushed forward more boldly, hoping that the next
day they need not waste the precious hours in concealment. In the early
morning they saw coming down over the prairie the first guard of a
Cheyenne village moving southward across their path. The Plains were
flat and covertless. No tall grass, nor friendly bank, nor bush, nor
hollow of ground was there to cover them from their enemies. But out
before them lay the rotting carcass of an old buffalo. Its hide still
hung about its bones. And inside the narrow shelter of this carcass the
two concealed themselves while a whole village passed near them trailing
off toward the south.
Insufficient food, lack of sleep, and poisonous water from the buffalo
wallows brought nausea and weakness to the faithful men making their way
across the hostile land to bring help to us in our dire extremity. It is
all recorded in history how these two men fared in that hazardous
undertaking. No hundred miles of sandy plain were ever more fraught with
peril; and yet these two pressed on with that fearless and indomitable
courage that has characterized the Saxon people on every field of
conquest.
Meanwhile day crept over the eastern horizon, and the cold chill of the
shadows gave place to the burning glare of the September sun. Hot and
withering it beat down upon us and upon the unburied dead that lay all
about us. The braves that had fallen in the strife strewed the island's
edges. Their blood lay dark on the sandy shoals of the stream and
stained to duller brown the trampled grasses. Daylight brought the
renewal of the treacherous sharpshooting. The enemy closed in about us
and from their points of vantage their deadly arrows and bullets were
hurled upon our low wall of defence. And so the unequal struggle
continued. Ours was henceforth an ambush fight. The redskins did not
attack us in open charge again, and we durst not go out to meet them.
And so the thing became a game of endurance with us, a slow wearing away
of ammunition and food, a growing fever from weakness and loss of blood,
a festering of wounds, the ebbing out of strength and hope; while putrid
mule meat and muddy water, the sickening stench from naked bloated
bodies under the blazing heat of day, the long, long hours of watching
for deliverance that came not, and the certainty of the fate awaiting us
at last if rescue failed us--these things marked the hours and made them
all alike. As to the Indians, the passing of Roman Nose had broken their
fighting spirit; and now it was a mere matter of letting us run to the
end of our tether and then--well, Jean had hinted what would happen.
On the third night two more scouts left us. It seemed an eternity since
Stillwell and his comrade had started from the camp. We felt sure that
they must have fallen by the way, and the second attempt was doubly
hazardous. The two who volunteered were quiet men. They knew what the
task implied, and they bent to it like men who can pay on demand the
price of sacrifice. Their names were Donovan and Pliley, recorded in the
military roster as private scouts, but the titles they bear in the
memory of every man who sat in that grim council on that night, has a
grander sound than the written records declare.
"Boys," Forsyth said, lifting himself on his elbow where he lay in his
sand bed, "this is the last chance. If you can get to the fort and send
us help we can hold out a while. But it must come quickly. You know what
it means for you to try, and for us, if you succeed."
The two men nodded assent, then girding on their equipments, they gave
us their last messages to be repeated if deliverance ever came to us and
they were never heard of again. We were getting accustomed to this now,
for Death stalked beside us every hour. They said a brief good-bye and
slipped out from us into the dangerous dark on their chosen task. Then
the chill of the night, with its uncertainty and gloom, with its ominous
silences broken only by the howl of the gray wolves, who closed in about
us and set up their hunger wails beyond the reach of our bullets; and
the heat of the day with its peril of arrow and rifle-ball filled the
long hours. Hunger was a terror now. Our meat was gone save a few
decayed portions which we could barely swallow after we had sprinkled
them over with gunpowder. For the stomach refused them even in
starvation. Dreams of banquets tortured our short, troubled sleep, and
the waking was a horror. A luckless little coyote wandered one day too
near our fold. We ate his flesh and boiled his bones for soup. And one
day a daring soldier slipped out from our sand pit in search of
food--anything--to eat in place of that rotting horseflesh. In the
bushes at the end of the island, he found a few wild plums. Oh, food
for the gods was that portion of stewed plums carefully doled out to
each of us.
Six days went by. I do not know on which one the Sabbath fell, for God
has no holy day in the Plains warfare. Six days, and no aid had come
from Fort Wallace. That our scouts had failed, and our fate was decreed,
was now the settled conclusion in every mind.
On the evening of this sixth day our leader called us about him. How
gray and drawn his face looked in the shadowy gray light, but his eyes
were clear and his voice steady.
"Boys, we've got to the end of our rope, now. Over there," pointing to
the low hills, "the Indian wolves are waiting for us. It's the hazard of
war; that's all. But we needn't all be sacrificed. You, who aren't
wounded, can't help us who are. You have nothing here to make our
suffering less. To stay here means--you all know what. Now the men who
can go must leave us to what's coming. I feel sure now that you can get
through together somehow, for the tribes are scattering. It is only the
remnant left over there to burn us out at last. There is no reason why
you should stay here and die. Make your dash for escape together
to-night, and save your lives if you can. And"--his voice was brave and
full of cheer--"I believe you can."
Then a silence fell. There were two dozen of us gaunt, hungry men,
haggard from lack of sleep and the fearful tax on mind and body that
tested human endurance to the limit--two dozen, to whom escape was not
impossible now, though every foot of the way was dangerous. Life is
sweet, and hope is imperishable. We looked into one another's face
grimly, for the crisis of a lifetime was upon us. Beside me lay Morton.
The handkerchief he had bound about his head in the first hour of
battle had not once been removed. There was no other handkerchief to
take its place.
"Go, Baronet," he said to me. "Tell your father, if you see him again,
that I remembered Whately and how he went down at Chattanooga."
His voice was low and firm and yet he knew what was awaiting him. Oh!
men walked on red-hot ploughshares in the days of the winning of the
West.
Sharp Grover was sitting beside Forsyth. In the silence of the council
the guide turned his eyes toward each of us. Then, clenching his gaunt,
knotted hands with a grip of steel, he said in a low, measured voice:
"It's no use asking us, General. We have fought together, and, by
Heaven, we'll die together."
In the great crises of life the only joy is the joy of self-sacrifice.
Every man of us breathed freer, and we were happier now than we had been
at any time since the conflict began. And so another twenty-four hours,
and still another twenty-four went by.
The sun came up and the sun went down,
And day and night were the same as one.
And any evil chance seemed better than this slow dragging out of
misery-laden time.
"Nature meant me to defend the weak and helpless. The West needs me," I
had said to my father. And now I had given it my best. A slow fever was
creeping upon me, and weariness of body was greater than pain and
hunger. Death would be a welcome thing now that hope seemed dead. I
thought of O'mie, bound hand and foot in the Hermit's Cave, and like
him, I wished that I might go quickly if I must go. For back of my
stolid mental state was a frenzied desire to outwit Jean Pahusca, who
was biding his time, and keeping a surer watch on our poor
battle-wrecked, starving force than any other Indian in the horde that
kept us imprisoned.
The sunrise of the twenty-fifth of September was a dream of beauty on
the Colorado Plains. I sat with my face to the eastward and saw the
whole pageantry of morning sweep up in a splendor of color through
stretches of far limitless distances. Oh! it was gorgeous, with a glory
fresh from the hand of the Infinite God, whose is the earth and the
seas. Mechanically I thought of the sunrise beyond the Neosho Valley,
but nothing there could be half so magnificent as this. And as I looked,
the thought grew firmer that this sublimity had been poured out for me
for the last time, and I gazed at the face of the morning as we look at
the face awaiting the coffin lid.
And even as the thought clinched itself upon me came the sentinel's cry
of "Indians! Indians!"
We grasped our weapons at the shrill warning. It was the death-grip now.
We knew as surely as we stood there that we could not resist this last
attack. The redskins must have saved themselves for this final blow,
when resistance on our part was a feeble mockery. The hills to the
northward were black with the approaching force, but we were determined
to make our last stand heroically, and to sell our lives as dearly as
possible. As with a grim last measure of courage we waited, Sharp
Grover, who stood motionless, alert, with arms ready, suddenly threw his
rifle high in air, and with a shout that rose to heaven, he cried in an
ecstasy of joy:
"By the God above us, it's an ambulance!"
To us for whom the frenzied shrieks of the squaws, the fiendish yells of
the savage warriors, and the weird, unearthly wailing for the dead were
the only cries that had resounded above the Plains these many days,
this shout from Grover was like the music of heaven. A darkness came
before me, and my strength seemed momentarily to go from me. It was but
a moment, and then I opened my eyes to the sublimest sight it is given
to the Anglo-American to look upon.
Down from the low bluffs there poured a broad surge of cavalry, in
perfect order, riding like the wind, the swift, steady hoof-beats of
their horses marking a rhythmic measure that trembled along the ground
in musical vibration, while overhead--oh, the grandeur of God's gracious
dawn fell never on a thing more beautiful--swept out by the free winds
of heaven to its full length, and gleaming in the sunlight, Old Glory
rose and fell in rippling waves of splendor.
On they came, the approaching force, in a mad rush to reach us. And we
who had waited for the superb charge of Roman Nose and his savage
warriors, as we wait for death, saw now this coming in of life, and the
regiment of the unconquerable people.
We threw restraint to the winds and shouted and danced and hugged each
other, while we laughed and cried in a very transport of joy.
It was Colonel Carpenter and his colored cavalry who had made a dash
across the country rushing to our rescue. Beside the Colonel at their
head, rode Donovan the scout, whom we had accounted as dead. It was his
unerring eye that had guided this command, never varying from the
straight line toward our danger-girt entrenchment on the Arickaree.
Before Carpenter's approaching cavalry the Indians fled for their lives,
and they who a few hours hence would have been swinging bloody tomahawks
above our heads were now scurrying to their hiding-places far away.
[Illustration: Like the passing of a hurricane, horses, mules, men, all
dashed toward the place]
Never tenderer hands cared for the wounded, and never were bath and
bandage and food and drink more welcome. Our command was shifted to a
clean spot where no stench of putrid flesh could reach us. Rest and
care, such as a camp on the Plains can offer, was ours luxuriously; and
hardtack and coffee, food for the angels, we had that day, to our
intense satisfaction. Life was ours once more, and hope, and home, and
civilization. Oh, could it be true, we asked ourselves, so long had we
stood face to face with Death.
The import of this struggle on the Arickaree was far greater than we
dreamed of then. We had gone out to meet a few foemen. What we really
had to battle with was the fighting strength of the northern Cheyenne
and Sioux tribes. Long afterwards it came to us what this victory meant.
The broad trail we had eagerly followed up the Arickaree fork of the
Republican River had been made by bands on bands of Plains Indians
mobilizing only a little to the westward, gathering for a deadly
purpose. At the full of the moon the whole fighting force, two thousand
strong, was to make a terrible raid, spreading out on either side of the
Republican River, reaching southward as far as the Saline Valley and
northward to the Platte, and pushing eastward till the older settlements
turned them back. They were determined to leave nothing behind them but
death and desolation. Their numbers and leadership, with the defenceless
condition of the Plains settlers, give broad suggestion of what that
raid would have done for Kansas. Our victory on the Arickaree broke up
that combination of Indian forces, for all future time. It was for such
an unknown purpose, and against such unguessed odds, that fifty of us
led by the God of all battle lines, had gone out to fight. We had met
and vanquished a foe two hundred times our number, aye, crippled its
power for all future years. We were lifting the fetters from the
frontier; we were planting the standards westward, westward. In the
history of the Plains warfare this fight on the Arickaree, though not
the last stroke, was one of the decisive struggles in breaking the
savage sovereignty, a sovereignty whose wilderness demesne to-day is a
land of fruit and meadow and waving grain, of peaceful homes and wealth
and honor.
It was impossible for our wounded comrades to begin the journey to Fort
Wallace on that day. When evening came, the camp settled down to quiet
and security: the horses fed at their rope tethers, the fires smouldered
away to gray ashes, the sun swung down behind the horizon bar, the gold
and scarlet of evening changed to deeper hues and the long, purple
twilight was on the silent Colorado Plains. Over by the Arickaree the
cavalry men lounged lazily in groups. As the shades of evening gathered,
the soldiers began to sing. Softly at first, but richer, fuller, sweeter
their voices rose and fell with that cadence and melody only the negro
voice can compass. And their song, pulsing out across the undulating
valley wrapped in the twilight peace, made a harmony so wonderfully
tender that we who had dared danger for days unflinchingly now turned
our faces to the shadows to hide our tears.
We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground.
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home
And friends we love so dear.
Many are the hearts that are weary to-night,
Wishing for this war to cease,
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.
So the cavalry men sang, and we listened to their singing with hearts
stirred to their depths. And then with prayers of thankfulness for our
deliverance, we went to sleep. And over on the little island, under the
shallow sands, the men who had fallen beside us lay with patient, folded
hands waiting beside the Arickaree waters till the last reveille shall
sound for them and they enter the kingdom of Eternal Peace.