The Price of the Prairie Part 31

The August sun was low in the west when I climbed up the gra.s.sy 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 a.s.sociation.

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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 appet.i.te, 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 gra.s.ses. 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 ma.s.sacre 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 Was.h.i.ta 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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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--G.o.d 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 bra.s.s only mocked them in their misery. Did a merciful G.o.d 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, gra.s.sy lands that border the Was.h.i.ta 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 Was.h.i.ta.

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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 st.u.r.dy 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 pa.s.s 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.