The Price of the Prairie Part 40

He looked down into her upturned face. Something neither would have put into words came to both, and the same picture came before each mind. It was the picture of a young soldier out at Fort Wallace, gathering back the strength the crucial test of a Plains campaign had cost him.

"There'll be the devil to pay," my father said to himself, as he watched Marjie pa.s.sing down the leaf-strewn walk, "but not a hair of her head shall suffer. When the time comes, I'll send for Judson, as I promised to do."

And Marjie, holding the letter in her hand thrust deep in her cloak pocket, felt strength and hope and courage pulsing in her veins, and a peace that she had not known for many days came with its blessing to her troubled soul.

CHAPTER XXI

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, st.u.r.dy, 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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.serted. "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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.ses 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 suns.h.i.+ne, and looked away through s.h.i.+mmering 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--G.o.d pity her! For her the gates of a living h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 l.u.s.t, 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. G.o.d'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.