THE CALL TO SERVICE
We go to rear a wall of men on Freedom's Southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree the rugged Northern pine!
--WHITTIER.
"Phil Baronet, you thon of a horthe-thief, where have you been keeping
yourthelf? We've been waiting here thinthe Thummer before latht to meet
you."
That was Bud Anderson's greeting. Pink-cheeked, sturdy, and stubby as a
five-year-old, he was standing in my path as I slipped from my horse in
front of old Fort Hays one October day a fortnight after the rescue of
Colonel Forsyth's little company.
"Bud, you tow-headed infant, how the dickens and tomhill did you manage
to break into good society out here?" I cried, as we clinched in each
other's arms, for Bud's appearance was food to my homesick hunger.
"When you git through, I'm nixt into the barber's chair."
I had not noticed O'mie leaning against a post beside the way, until
that Irish brogue announced him.
"Why, boys, what's all this delegation mean?"
"Aw," O'mie drawled. "You've been elected to Congress and we're the
proud committy av citizens in civilians' clothes, come to inform you av
your elevation."
"You mean you've come to get first promise of an office under me.
Sorry, but I know you too well to jeopardize the interest of the
Republican party and the good name of Kansas by any rash promises. It's
dinner time, and I'm hungry. I don't believe I'll ever get enough to eat
again."
Oh, it was good to see them, albeit our separation had amounted to
hardly sixty days. Bud had been waiting for me almost a week; and O'mie,
to Bud's surprise, had come upon him unannounced that morning. The
dining-room was crowded; and as soon as dinner was over we went outside
and sat down together where we could visit our fill unmolested. They
wanted to know about my doings, but I was too eager to hear all the home
news to talk of myself.
"Everybody all right when I left," Bud asserted. "I got off a few dayth
before thith mitherable thon of Erin. Didn't know he'd tag me, or I'd
have gone to Canada." He gave O'mie an affectionate slap on the shoulder
as he spoke.
"Your father and Aunt Candace are well, and glad you came out of the
campaign you've been makin' a record av unfadin' glory in. Judge Baronet
was the last man I saw when I left town," O'mie said.
"Why, where was Uncle Cam?" I asked.
"Oh, pretendin' to be busy somewheres. Awful busy man, that Cam Gentry."
O'mie smiled at the remembrance. He knew why tender-hearted Cam had fled
from a good-bye scene. "Dave Mead's goin' to start to California in a
few days." He rattled on, "The church supper in October was the biggest
they've had yet. Dever's got a boil on the back of his neck, and Jim
Conlow's drivin' stage for him. Jim had a good job in Topeka, but come
back to Springvale. Can't keep the Conlows corralled anywhere else.
Everybody else is doing fine except Grandma Mead. She's failin'. Old
town looked pretty good to me when I looked back at it from the east
bluff of the Neosho."
It had looked good to each one of us at the same place when each started
out to try the West alone. Somehow we did not care to talk, for a few
minutes.
"What brought you out here, Bud?" I asked to break the spell.
"Oh, three or four thingth. I wanted to thee you," Bud answered. "You
never paid me that fifteen thenth you borrowed before you went to
college."
"And then," he continued, "the old town on the Neosho'th too thmall for
me. Our family ith related to the Daniel Boone tribe of Indianth, and
can't have too big a crowd around. Three children of the family are at
home, and I wanted to come out here anyhow. I'd like to live alwayth on
the Plainth and have a quiet grave at the end of the trail where the
wind blowth thteady over me day after day."
We were lounging against the side of the low building now in the warm
afternoon sunshine, and Bud's eyes were gazing absently out across the
wide Plains. Although I had been away from home only two months, I felt
twenty years older than this fair-haired, chubby boy, sitting there so
full of blooming life and vigor. I shivered at the picture his words
suggested.
"Don't joke, Bud. There's a grave at the end of most of the trails out
here. The trails aren't very long, some of 'em. The wind sweeps over 'em
lonely and sad day after day. They're quiet enough, Heaven knows. The
wrangle and noise are all on the edge of 'em, just as you're getting
ready to get in."
"I'm not joking, Phil. All my life I have wanted to get out here. It'th
a fever in the blood."
We talked a while of the frontier, of the chances of war, and of the
Indian raids with their trail of destruction, death, torture and
captivity of unspeakable horror.
The closing years of the decade of the sixties in American history saw
the closing events of the long and bitter, but hopeless struggle of a
savage race against a superior civilized force. From the southern bound
of British America to the northern bound of old Mexico the Plains
warfare was waged.
The Western tribes, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, and Kiowa, and Brule, and
Sioux and Comanche were forced to quarter themselves on their
reservations again and again with rations and clothing and equipments
for all their needs. With fair, soft promises in return from their chief
men these tribes settled purringly in their allotted places. Through
each fall and winter season they were "good Indians," wards of the
nation; their "untutored mind saw God in clouds, or heard him in the
wind."
Eastern churches had an "Indian fund" in their contribution boxes, and
very pathetic and beautifully idyllic was the story the sentimentalists
told, the story of the Indian as he looked in books and spoke on paper.
But the Plains had another record, and the light called History is
pitiless. When the last true story is written out, it has no favoring
shadows for sentimentalists who feel more than they know.
Each Winter the "good Indians" were mild and gentle. But with the warmth
of Spring and the fruitfulness of summer, with the green grasses of the
Plains for their ponies, with wild game in the open, and the labor of
the industrious settler of the unprotected frontier as a stake for the
effort, the "good Indian" came forth from his reservation. Like the
rattlesnake from its crevice, he uncoiled in the warm sunshine, grew
and flourished on what lay in his pathway, and full of deadly venom he
made a trail of terror and death.
This sort of thing went on year after year until, in the late Summer of
1868, the crimes of the savages culminated in those terrible raids
through western Kansas, whose full particulars even the official war
records deem unfit to print.
Such were the times the three of us from Springvale were discussing on
the south side of the walls of old Fort Hays in the warm sunshine of an
October afternoon.
We were new to the Plains and we did not dream of the tragedies that
were taking place not many miles away from the shadow of the Fort on
that October afternoon, tragedies whose crimes we three would soon be
called forth to help to avenge. For even as we lounged idly there in the
soft sunshine, and looked away through shimmering seas of autumn haze
toward the still land where Bud was to find his quiet grave at the end
of the trail--as we talked of the frontier and its needs, up in the
Saline Valley, a band of Indians was creeping stealthily upon a
cornfield where a young man was gathering corn. In his little home just
out of sight was a pretty, golden-haired girl, the young settler's bride
of a few months. Through the window she caught sight of her husband's
horse racing wildly toward the house. She did not know that her husband,
wounded and helpless, lay by the river bank, pierced by Indian arrows.
Only one thought was hers, the thought that her husband had been
hurt--maybe killed--in a runaway. What else could this terrified horse
with its flying harness ends mean? She rushed from the house and started
toward the field.
A shout of fiendish glee fell on her ears. She was surrounded by painted
savage men, human devils, who caught her by the arms, dragged her about
by her long silky, golden hair, beat her brutally in her struggles to
free herself, bound her at last, and thrusting her on a pony, rode as
only Indians ride, away toward the sunset. And their captive, the sweet
girl-wife of gentle birth and gentle rearing, the happy-hearted young
home-maker on the prairie frontier, singing about her work an hour
before, dreaming of the long, bright years with her loved one--God pity
her! For her the gates of a living Hell had swung wide open, and she,
helpless and horror-stricken, was being dragged through them into a
perdition no pen can picture. And so they rode away toward the sunset.
On and on they went through days and days of unutterable blackness, of
suffering and despair. On, until direction and space were lost to
measure. For her a new, pitiless, far-off heaven looked down on a new
agonized earth. The days ran into months, and no day had in it a ray of
hope, a line of anything but misery.
And again beyond the Saline, where the little streams turn toward the
Republican River, in another household the same tragedy of the times was
being played, with all its settings of terror and suffering. Here the
grown-up daughter of the home, a girl of eighteen years, was wrenched
from arms that clung to her, and, bound on a pony's back, was hurried
three hundred miles away into an unknown land. For her began the life of
a slave. She was the victim of brute lust, the object of the vengeful
jealousy of the squaws. The starved, half-naked, wretched girl, whose
eighteen years had been protected in the shelter of a happy Christian
home, was now the captive laborer whose tasks strong men would stagger
under. God's providence seemed far away in those days of the winning of
the prairie.
Fate, by and by, threw these two women together. Their one ray of
comfort was the sight of one another. And for both the days dragged
heavily by, the two women of my boyhood's dreams. Women of whose fate I
knew nothing as we sat by the south side of old Fort Hays that afternoon
forty years ago.
"Did you know, boys, that General Sheridan is not going to let those
tribes settle down to a quiet winter as they've been allowed to do every
year since they were put on their reservations?" I asked O'mie and Bud.
"I've been here long enough to find out that these men out here won't
stand for it any longer," I went on. "They're MEN on these Plains, who
are doing this homesteading up and down these river valleys, and you
write every letter of the word with a capital."
"What'th going to be done?" Bud queried.
"Sheridan's going to carry a campaign down into their own country and
lick these tribes into behaving themselves right now, before another
Summer and another outbreak like that one two months ago."
"What's these Kansas men with their capital letters got to do with it?"
put in O'mie.
"Governor Crawford has issued a call at Sheridan's command, for a Kansas
regiment to go into service for six months, and help to do this thing up
right. It means more to these settlers on the boundary out here than to
anybody else. And you just see if that regiment isn't made up in a
hurry."
I was full of my theme. My two months beyond the soft, sheltered life of
home had taught me much; and then I was young and thought I knew much,
anyhow.
"What are you going to do, Phil?" O'mie asked.
"I? I'm going to stay by this thing for a while. The Baronets were
always military folks. I'm the last of the line, and I'm going to give
my fighting strength, what little I have, to buy these prairies for
homes and civilization. I'm going to see the Indian rule broken here, or
crawl into the lonely grave Bud talks about and pull the curly mesquite
over me for a coverlet. I go to Topeka to-morrow to answer Governor
Crawford's call for volunteers for a cavalry company to go out on a
winter campaign against the rascally redskins. They're going to get what
they need. If you mix up with Custer, you'll see."
"And when the campaign's over," queried O'mie, "will you stay in the
army?"
"No, O'mie, I'll find a place. The world is wide. But look here, boy.
You haven't told me how you got pried loose and kicked out yet. Bud's an
exception. The rest of us boys had a reason for leaving the best town on
earth."
"You're just right, begorra!" O'mie replied with warmth. "I was kicked
out av town by His Majesty, the prophet Amos, only you've got to spell
it with an 'f' instead av a 'ph.'"
"Now, O'mie, confess the whole sin at once, please."
O'mie looked up with that sunshiny face that never stayed clouded long,
and chuckled softly. "Judson's on the crest right now. Oh, let him ride.
He's doomed, so let him have his little strut. He comes to me a few days
backward into the gone on, and says, says he, important and commercial
like, 'O'mie, I shall not need you any more. I've got a person to take
your place.' 'All right,' I responds, respectful, 'just as you please.
When shall I lave off?' 'To-morrow mornin',' he answers, an' looks at
me as if to say, 'Nothin' left for you but the poor-house.' And indade,
a clerk under Judson don't make no such bank account as he made under
Irving Whately. I ain't ready to retire yet."
"And do you mean to say that because Amos Judson turned you off and cut
you out of his will, you had to come out to this forsaken land? I
thought better of the town," I declared.
"Oh, don't you mind! Cris Mead offered me a place in the bank. Dr.
Hemingway was fur havin' me fill his pulpit off an' on. He's gettin'
old. An' Judge Baronet was all but ready to adopt me in the place av a
son he'd lost. But I knowed the boy'd soon be back."
O'mie gave me a sidelong glance, but I gave no hint of any feeling.
"No, I was like Bud, ready to try the frontier," he added more
seriously. "I'm goin' down with you to join this Kansas regiment."
"Now what the deuce can you do in the army, O'mie?" I could not think of
him anywhere but in Springvale.
"I want to live out av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered.
"And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle
and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come to Springvale
last month?"
"Give it up," I answered.
"Father Le Claire."
"Oh, the good man!" Bud exclaimed.
"Where has he been? and where was he going?" I asked coldly.
O'mie looked at me curiously. He was shrewder than Bud, and he caught
the tone I had meant to conceal.
"Where? Just now he's gone to St. Louis. He's in a hospital there. He's
been sick. I never saw him so white and thin as whin he left. He told
me he expected to be with the Osages this Winter."
"I'm glad of that," I remarked.
"Why?" O'mie spoke quickly.
"Oh, I was afraid he might go out West. It's hard on priests in the
West."
O'mie looked steadily at me, but said nothing.
"Who taketh your plathe, O'mie?" Bud asked.
"That's the beauty av it. It's a lady," O'mie answered.
Somehow my heart grew sick. Could it be Marjie, I wondered. I knew money
matters were a problem with the Whatelys, but I had hoped for better
fortune through my father's help. Maybe, though, they would have none of
him now any more than of myself. When Marjie and I were engaged I did
not care for her future, for it was to be with me, and my burden was my
joy then. Not that earning a living meant any disgrace to the girl. We
all learned better than that early in the West.
"Well, who be thaid lady?" Bud questioned.
"Miss Letitia Conlow," O'mie answered with a grave face.
"Oh, well, don't grieve, O'mie; it might be worse. Cheer up!" I said
gayly.
"It couldn't be, by George! It just couldn't be no worse." O'mie was
more than grave, he was sad now. "Not for me, bedad! I'm glad." He
breathed deeply of the sweet, pure air of the Plains. "I can live out
here foine, but there's goin' to be the divil to pay in the town av
Springvale in the nixt six months. I'm glad to be away."
The next day I left the fort for Topeka. My determination to stay in the
struggle was not merely a young man's love of adventure, nor was my
declaration of what would be done to the Indian tribes an idle boast.
The tragic days of Kansas were not all in its time of territorial strife
and border ruffianism. The story of the Western Plains--the short grass
country we call it now--in the decade following the Civil War is a
tragedy of unparalleled suffering and danger and heroism. In the cold
calculation of the official reports the half-year I had entered on has
its tabulated record of one hundred and fifty-eight men murdered,
sixteen wounded, forty-one scalped, fourteen women tortured, four women
and twenty-four children carried into captivity. And nearly all this
record was made in the Saline and Solomon and Republican River valleys
in Kansas.
The Summer of the preceding year a battalion of soldiers called the
Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry spent four months on the Plains. Here they met
and fought two deadly foes, the Indians and the Asiatic cholera. Theirs
was a record of bravery and endurance; and their commander, Major Horace
L. Moore, keeps always a place in my own private hall of fame.
Winter had made good Indians out of the savage wretches, as usual; but
the Summer of 1868 brought that official count of tragedy with all the
unwritten horror that history cannot burden itself to carry. Only one
thing seemed feasible now, to bear the war straight into the heart of
the Indian country in a winter campaign, to deal an effectual blow to
the scourge of the Plains, this awful menace to the frontier homes.
General Sheridan had asked Kansas to furnish a cavalry regiment for
United States military service for six months.
The capital city was a wide-awake place that October. The call for
twelve hundred men was being answered by the veterans of the Plains and
by the young men of Kansas. The latter took up the work as many a
volunteer in the Civil War began it--in a sort of heyday of excitement
and achievement. They gave little serious thought to the cost, or the
history their record was to make. But in the test that followed they
stood, as the soldiers of the nation had stood before them, courageous,
unflinching to the last. Little notion had those rollicking young
fellows of what lay before them--a winter campaign in a strange country
infested by a fierce and cunning foe who observed no etiquette of
civilized warfare.
At the Teft House, where Bud and O'mie and I stopped, I met Richard
Tillhurst. We greeted each other cordially enough.
"So you're here to enlist, too," he said. "I thought maybe you were on
your way home. I am going to enlist myself and give up teaching
altogether if I can pass muster." He was hardly of the physical build
for a soldier. "Have you heard the news?" he went on. "Judson and
Marjory are engaged. Marjie doesn't speak of it, of course, but Judson
told Dr. Hemingway and asked him to officiate when the time comes. Mrs.
Whately says it's between the young people, and that means she has given
her consent. Judson spends half his time at Whately's, whether Marjie's
there or not. There's something in the air down there this Fall that's
got everybody keyed up one way or another. Tell Mapleson's been like a
boy at a circus, he's so pleased over something; and Conlow has a grin
on his face all the time. Everybody seems just unsettled and anxious,
except Judge Baronet. Honestly, I don't see how that town could keep
balanced without him. He sails along serene and self-possessed. Always
knows more than he tells."
"I guess Springvale is safe with him, and we can go out and save the
frontier," I said carelessly.
"For goodness' sake, who goes there?" Tillhurst pushed me aside and made
a rush out of doors, as a lady passed before the windows. I followed and
caught a glimpse of the black hair and handsome form of Rachel Melrose.
At the same moment she saw me. Her greeting lacked a little of its
former warmth, but her utter disregard of anything unpleasant having
been between us was positively admirable. Her most coquettish smiles,
however, were for Tillhurst, but that didn't trouble me. Our interview
was cut short by the arrival of the stage from the south just then, and
I turned from Tillhurst to find myself in my father's embrace. What
followed makes one of the sacred memories a man does not often put into
print.
We wanted to be alone, so we left the noisy hotel and strolled out
toward the higher level beyond the town. There was only brown prairie
then stretching to the westward and dipping down with curve and ravine
to the Kaw River on the one side and the crooked little Shunganunga
Creek on the other. Away in the southwest the graceful curve of
Burnett's Mound, a low height like a tiny mountain-peak, stood out
purple and hazy in the October sunlight. A handful of sturdy young
people were taking their way to Lincoln College, the little stone
structure that was to be dignified a month later by a new title,
Washburn College, in honor of its great benefactor, Ichabod Washburn.
"Why did the powers put the State Capitol and the College so far from
town, I wonder," I said as we loitered about the walls of the former.
"For the same reason that the shortsighted colonists of the Revolution
put Washington away off up the Potomac, west of the thirteen States,"
my father answered. "We can't picture a city here now, but it will be
built in your day if not in mine."
And then we walked on until before us stood that graceful little locust
tree, the landmark of the prairie. Its leaves were falling in golden
showers now, save as here and there a more protected branch still held
its summer green foliage.
"What a beautiful, sturdy little pioneer!" my father exclaimed. "It has
earned a first settler's right to the soil. I hope it will be given the
chance to live, the chance most of the settlers have had to fight for,
as it has had to stand up against the winds and hold its own against the
drouth. Any enterprising city official who would some day cut it down
should be dealt with by the State."
We sat down by the tree and talked of many things, but my father
carefully avoided the mention of Marjie's name. When he gave the little
girl the letter that had fallen from her cloak pocket he read her story
in her face, but he had no right or inclination to read it aloud to me.
I tried by all adroit means to lead him to tell me of the Whatelys. It
was all to no purpose. On any other topic I would have quitted the game,
but--oh, well, I was just the same foolish-hearted boy that put the pink
blossoms on a little girl's brown curls and kissed her out in the purple
shadows of the West Draw one April evening long ago. And now I was about
to begin a dangerous campaign where the hazard of war meant a nameless
grave for a hundred, where it brought after years of peace and honor to
one. I must hear something of Marjie. The love-light in her brown eyes
as she gave me one affectionate glance when I presented her to Rachel
Melrose in my father's office--that pledge of her heart, I pictured over
and over in my memory.
"Father, Tillhurst says he has heard that Amos Judson and Marjie are
engaged. Are they?" I put the question squarely. My father was stripping
the gold leaves one by one off a locust spray.
"Yes, I have heard it, too," he replied, and to save my life I could not
have judged by word or manner whether he cared one whit or not. He was
studying me, if toying with a locust branch and whistling softly and
gazing off at Burnett's Mound are marks of study. He had nothing of
himself to reveal. "I have heard it several times," he went on. "Judson
has made the announcement quietly, but generally."
He threw away the locust branch, shook down his cuff and settled it in
his sleeve, lifted his hat from his forehead and reset it on his head,
and then added as a final conclusion, "I don't believe it."
He had always managed me most skilfully when he wanted to find out
anything; and when the time came that I began in turn to manage him,
being of his own blood, the game was interesting. But before I knew it,
we had drifted far away from the subject, and I had no opportunity to
come back to it. My father had found out all he wanted to know.
"Phil, I must leave on the train for Kansas City this evening," he said
as we rose to go back to town. "I'm to meet Morton there, and we may go
on East together. He will have the best surgeons look after that wound
of his, Governor Crawford tells me."
Then laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder he said, "I
congratulate you on the result of your first campaign. I had hoped it
would be your last; but you are a man, and must choose for yourself.
Yet, if you mean to give yourself to your State now, if you choose a
man's work, do it like a man, not like a schoolboy on a picnic
excursion. The history of Kansas is made as much by the privates down in
the ranks as by the men whose names and faces adorn its record. You are
making that record now. Make it strong and clean. Let the glory side go,
only do your part well. When you have finished this six months and are
mustered out, I want you to come home at once. There are some business
matters and family matters demanding it. But I must go to Kansas City,
and from there to New York on important business. And since nobody has a
lease on life, I may as well say now that if you get back and I'm not
there, O'mie left his will with me before he went away."
"His will? Now what had he to leave? And who is his beneficiary?"
"That's all in the will," my father said, smiling, "but it is a matter
that must not be overlooked. In the nature of things the boy will go
before I do. He's marked, I take it; never has gotten over the hardships
of his earliest years and that fever in '63. Le Claire came back to see
him and me in September."
"He did? Where did he come from?"
My father looked at me quickly. "Why do you ask?" he queried.
"I'll tell you when we have more time. Just now I'm engaged to fight the
Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, in which last
tribe my friend Jean Pahusca has pack right. He was in that gang of
devils that fought us out on the Arickaree."
For once I thought I knew more than my father, but he replied quietly,
"Yes, I knew he was there. His tether may be long, but its limit will be
reached some day."
"Who told you he was there, father?" I asked.
"Le Claire said so," he answered.
"Where was he at that time?" I was getting excited now.
"He spent the week in the little stone cabin out by the big cottonwood.
Took cold and had to go to St. Louis to a hospital for a week or two."
"He was in the haunted cabin the third week in September," I repeated
slowly; "then I don't know black from white any more."
My father smiled at me. "They call that being 'locoed' out on the
Plains, don't they?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. "You have a
delusion mixed up in your gray matter somewhere. One thing more," he
added as an unimportant afterthought, "I see Miss Melrose is still in
Topeka."
"Yes," I answered.
"And Tillhurst, too," he went on. "Well, there has been quite a little
story going around Conlow's shop and the post-office and Fingal's Creek
and other social centres about you two; and now when Tillhurst gets back
(he'll never make the cavalry), he's square, but a little vain and
thin-skinned, and he may add something of color and interest to the
story. Let it go. Just now it may be better so."
I thought his words were indefinite, for one whose purposes were always
definite, and in the wisdom of my youth I wondered whether he really
wanted me to follow Rachel's leading, or whether he was, after all,
inclined to believe Judson's assertion about his engagement, and family
pride had a little part to play with him. It was unlike John Baronet to
stoop to a thing like that.
"Father," I said, "I'm going away, too. I may never come back, and for
my own sake I want to assure you of one thing: no matter what Tillhurst
may say, if Rachel Melrose were ten times more handsome, if she had in
her own name a fortune such as I can never hope to acquire myself, she
would mean nothing to me. I care nothing for the stories now"--a
hopelessness would come into my voice--"but I do not care for her
either. I never did, and I never could."
My eyes were away on Burnett's Mound, and the sweet remembrance of
Marjie's last affectionate look made a blur before them. We stood in
silence for some time.
"Phil," said John Baronet in a deep, fervent tone, "I have a matter I
meant to take up later, but this is a good time. Let the young folks go
now. This is a family matter. Years ago a friend of the older Baronets
died in the East leaving some property that should sooner or later come
to me to keep in trust for you. This time was to be at the death of the
man and his wife who had the property for their lifetime. Philip, you
have been accused by the Conlow-Judson crowd of wanting a rich wife. I
also am called grasping by Tell Mapleson's class. And," he smiled a
little, "indeed, Iago's advice to Roderigo, 'Put money in thy purse,'
was sound philosophy if the putting be honestly done. But this little
property in the East that should come to you is in the hands of a man
who is now ill, probably in his last sickness. He has one child that
will have nothing else left to her. Shall we take this money at her
father's death?"
"Why, father, no. I don't want it. Do you want it?"
I knew him too well to ask the question. Had I not seen the unselfish,
kindly, generous spirit that had marked all his business career?
Springvale never called him grasping, save as his prosperity grated on
men of Mapleson's type.
"Will you sign a relinquishment to your claim, and trust to me that it
is the best for us to do?" he asked.
"Just as soon as we get to an inkstand," I answered. Nor did I ever hold
that such a relinquishment is anything but Christian opportunity.
That evening I said good-bye to my father, and when I saw him again it
was after I had gone through the greatest crisis of these sixty years.
On the same train that bore my father to the East were his friend Morton
and his political and professional antagonist, Tell Mapleson. The next
day I enlisted in Troop A of the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry, and was
quartered temporarily in the State House, north of Fifth Street, on
Kansas Avenue. Tillhurst was not admitted to the regiment, as my father
had predicted. Neither was Jim Conlow, who had come up to Topeka for
that purpose. Good-natured, shallow-pated "Possum," no matter where he
found work to do, he sooner or later drifted back to Springvale to his
father's forge. He did not realize that no Conlow of the Missouri breed
ought ever to try anything above a horse's hoofs, in cavalry matters.
The Lord made some men to shoe horses, and some to ride them. The
Conlows weren't riders, and Jim's line was turned again to his father's
smithy.
Tillhurst took his failure the more grievously that Rachel, who had been
most gracious to him at first, transferred her attentions to me. And I,
being only a man and built of common clay, with my lifetime hope
destroyed, gave him good reason to believe in my superior influence with
the beautiful Massachusetts girl. I had a game to play with Rachel, for
Topeka was full of pretty girls, and I made the most of my time. I knew
somewhat of the gayety the Winter on the Plains was about to offer. As
long as I could I held to the pleasures of the civilized homes and
sheltered lives. And with all and all, one sweet girl-face, enshrined in
my heart's holy of holies, held me back from idle deception and turned
me from temptation.