The Price of the Prairie Part 57

It was late in the August of the following year, when the Kansas prairies were brownest and the summer heat the fiercest, that I was met at the courthouse door one afternoon by a lithe, coppery Osage Indian boy, who handed me a bundle, saying, "From Hard Rope, for John Baronet's son."

"Well, all right, sonny; only it's about time for the gentleman in there to be known as Philip Baronet's father. He never fought the Cheyennes.

He's just the father of the man who did. What's the tariff due on this junk?"

The Osage did not smile, but he answered mildly enough, "What you will pay."

I was not cross with the world. I could afford to be generous, even at the risk of having the whole Osage tribe trailing at my heels, and begging for tobacco and food and trinkets. I loaded that young buck to the guards with the things an Indian prizes, and sent him away.

Then in my own office I undid the bundle. It was the old scarlet blanket with the white circular centre, the pattern Jean Pahusca always wore.

This one was dirty and frayed and splotched. I turned from it with loathing. In the folds of the cloth a sealed letter was securely fastened. Some soldier had written it for Hard Rope, and the penmanship and language were more than average fine. But the story it told I could not exult over, although a sense of lifted pressure in some corner of my mind came with the reading.

Briefly it recited that Jean Pahusca, Kiowa renegade, was dead. Custer's penalty for him had been to give him over to the Kiowas as their captive. When the tribe left Fort Sill in March, Satanta had had him brought bound to the Kiowa village then on the lower Was.h.i.ta. His crime, committed on the day of Custer's fight with Black Kettle, was the heinous one of stealing his Uncle Satanta's youngest and favorite wife, and leaving her to perish miserably in the cold of that December month in which we also had suffered. His plan had been to escape from the Kiowas and reach the Cheyennes on the Sweet.w.a.ter before we did, to meet me there, and this time, to give no moment for my rescue. So Hard Rope's message ran. But this was not all. The punishment that fell on Jean Pahusca was in proportion to his crime, as an Indian counts justice. He was sold as a slave to the Apaches and carried captive to the mountains of Old Mexico. Nor was he ever liberated again. Up above the snow line, with the pa.s.ses guarded (for Jean was as dangerous to his mother's race as to his father's), he had fretted away his days, dying at last of cold and cruel neglect among the dreary rocks of the icy peaks. This much information Hard Rope's letter brought. I burned both the letter and the blanket, telling no one of them except my father.

"This Hard Rope was for some reason very friendly to me on your account," I said. "He told me on the Was.h.i.ta the night before we left Camp Inman that he had shadowed Jean all the time he was at Fort Sill, and had more than once prevented the half-breed from making an attack on me. He promised to let me know what became of Pahusca if he ever found out. He has kept his word."

"I know Hard Rope," my father said. "I saved his life one annuity day long ago. Tell Mapleson had made Jean Pahusca drunk. You know what kind of a beast he was then. And Tell had run this Osage into Jean's path, where he would be sure to lose his life, and Tell would have the big pile of money Hard Rope carried. That's the kind of beast Tell was. An Indian has his own sense of obligation; and then it is a good a.s.set to be humane all along the line anyhow, although I never dreamed I was saving the man who was to save my boy."

"Shall we tell Le Claire?" I asked.

"Only that both Jean and his father are dead. We'll spare him the rest.

Le Claire has gone to St. Louis to a monastery. He will never be strong again. But he is one of the kings of the earth; he has given the best years of his manhood to build up a kingdom of peace between the white man and the savage. No record except the Great Book of human deeds will ever be able to show how much we owe to men like Le Claire whose influence has helped to make a loyal peaceful tribe like the Osages. The brutal fiendishness of the Plains Indians is the heritage of Spanish cruelty toward the ancestors of the Apache and Kiowa and Arapahoe and Comanche, and you can see why they differ from our tribes here in Eastern Kansas. Le Claire has done his part toward the purchase of the Plains, and I am glad for the quiet years before him."

It was the custom in Springvale for every girl to go up to Topeka for the final purchases of her bridal belongings. We were to be married in October. In the late September days Mrs. Whately and her daughter spent a week at the capital city. I went up at the end of the visit to come home with them. Since the death of Irving Whately nothing had ever roused his wife to the pleasure of living like this preparation for Marjie's marriage, and Mrs. Whately, still a young and very pretty woman, bloomed into that mature comeliness that carries a grace of permanence the promise of youth may only hint at. She delighted in every detail of the coming event, and we two most concerned were willing to let anybody look after the details. We had other matters to think about.

"Come, little sweetheart," I said one night after supper at the Teft House, "your mother is to spend the evening with a friend of hers. I want to take you for a walk."

Strange how beautiful Topeka looked to me this September. It had all the making of a handsome city even then, although the year since I came up to the political rally had brought no great change except to extend the borders somewhat. Like two happy young lovers we strolled out toward the southwest, past the hole in the ground that was to contain the foundation of the new wings for the State Capitol, past Washburn College, and on to where the slender little locust tree waved its dainty lacy branches in graceful welcome.

"Marjie, I want you to see this tree. It's not the first time I have been here. Rachel--Mrs. Tillhurst--and I came here a few times."

Marjie's hand nestled softly against my arm. "I always made faces at it as soon as I got away from it; but it is a beautiful little tree, and I want to put you with it in my mind. It was here last Fall that my father said he didn't believe that you were engaged to Amos Judson."

"Didn't believe," Marjie cried; "why, Phil, he knew I wasn't. I told him so when he was asked to urge me to marry Amos."

"He urge you to marry Amos! Now Marjie, girl, I hate to be hard on the gentleman; but if he did that it's my duty to scalp him, and I will go home and do it."

But Marjie explained. We sat in the moonlight by the locust-tree just as Rachel and I had done; only now Topeka and the tree and the silvery prairie and the black-shadowed Shunganunga Creek, winding down toward the Kaw through many devious turns, all seemed a fairy land which the moonbeams touched and glorified for us two. I can never think of Topeka, even to-day, with its broad avenues and beautiful shaded parks and paved ways, its handsome homes and churches and colleges, with all these to make it a proud young city--I can never think of it and leave out that st.u.r.dy young locust, grown now to a handsome tree. And when I think of it I do not think of the beautiful black-haired Eastern girl, with her rich dress and aristocratic manner. But always that sweet-faced, brown-eyed Kansas girl is with me there. And the open prairie dipping down to the creek, and the purple tip of Burnett's Mound, make a setting for the picture.

One October day when the wooded valley of the Neosho was in its autumn glory, when the creeping vines on the gray stone bluff were aflame with the frost's rich scarlet painting, and the west prairies were all one shimmering sea of gold flecked with emerald and purple; while above all these curved the wide magnificent skies of Kansas, unclouded, fathomless, and tenderly blue; when the peace of G.o.d was in the air and his benediction of love was on all the land,--on such a day as this, the clear-toned old Presbyterian Church bell rang the wedding chimes for Marjory Whately and Philip Baronet. Loving hands had made the church a bower of autumn coloring with the dainty relief of pink and white asters against the bronze richness of the season. Bess Anderson played the wedding march, as we two came up the aisle together and met Dr.

Hemingway at the chancel rail. I was in my young manhood's zenith, and I walked the earth like a king. Marjie wore my mother's wedding veil. Her white gown was soft and filmy, a fabric of her mother's own choosing, and her brown wavy hair was crowned with orange blossoms.

Springvale talked of that wedding for many a moon, for there was not a feature of the whole beautiful service, even to the very least appointment, that was not perfect in its simplicity and harmonious in its blending with everything about it.

Among the guests in the Baronet home, where everybody came to wish us happiness, was my father's friend and my own hero, Morton of the Saline Valley. Somehow I needed his presence that day. It kept me in touch with my days of greatest schooling. The quiet, forceful friend, who had taught me how to meet the realities of life like a man, put into my wedding a memory I shall always treasure. O'mie was still with us then.

When his turn came to greet us he held Marjie's hand a moment while he slyly showed her a poor little bunch of faded brown blossoms which he crumpled to dust in his fingers.

"I told you I wouldn't keep them no longer'n till I caught the odor of them orange blooms. They are the little pink wreath two other fellows threw away out in the West Draw long ago. The rale evidence of my good-will to you two is locked up in Judge Baronet's safe."

We laughed, but we did not understand. Not until the Irish boy's will was read, more than half a year later, when the pink flowers were blooming again in the West Draw, did we comprehend the measure of his good-will. For by his legal last wish all his possessions, including the land, with the big cottonwood and the old stone cabin, became the property of Marjory Whately and her heirs and a.s.signs forever.

Out there in later years we built our country home. The breezes of summer are always cool there, and from every wide window we can see the landscape the old cottonwood still watches over. Above the gateway to the winding road leading up from the West Draw is inscribed the name we gave the place,

O'MIE-HEIM.

Sixty years, and a white-haired, young-hearted young man I am who write these lines. For many seasons I have sat on the Judge's bench. Law has been my business on the main line, with land dealings on the side, and love for my fellowmen all along the way. Half a century of my life has run parallel with the story of Kansas, whose beautiful prairies have been purchased not only with the coin of the country, but with the coin of courage and unparalleled endurance. To-day the rippling billows of yellow wheat, the walls on walls of black-green corn, the stretches of emerald alfalfa set with its gems of amethyst bloom; orchard and meadow, grove and gra.s.sy upland, where cattle pasture; populous cities and churches and stately college halls; the whirring factory wheels, the dust of the mines, the black oil derrick and the huge reservoirs of natural gas, with the slender steel pathways of the great trains of traffic binding these together; and above all, the sheltered happy homes, where little children play never dreaming of fear; where sweet-browed mothers think not of loneliness and anguish and peril--all these are the splendid heritage of a land whose law is for the whole people, a land whose G.o.d is the Lord.

Slowly, through tribulation, and distress, and persecution, and famine, and nakedness, and peril, and sword; through fire and flood; through summer's drought and winter's blizzard; through loneliness, and fear, and heroism, and martyrdom too often at last, the brave-hearted, liberty-loving, indomitable people have come into their own, paying foot by foot, the price that won this prairie kingdom in the heart of the West.

Down through the years of busy cares, of struggle and achievement, of hopes deferred and victories counted, my days have run in shadow and sunshine, with more of practical fact than of poetic dreaming. And through them all, the call of the prairie has sounded in my soul, the voice of a beautiful land, singing evermore its old, old song of victory and peace. Aye, and through it all, beside me, cheering each step, holding fast my hand, making life always fine and beautiful and gracious for me, has been my loved one, Marjie, the bride of my young manhood, the mother of my sons and daughters, the light of my life.

It is for such as she, for homes her kind have made, that men have fought and dared and died, fulfilling the high privilege of the American citizen, the privilege to safeguard the hearthstones of the land above which the flag floats a symbol of light and law and love.

And I who write this know--for I have learned in the years whose story is here only a half-told thing under my halting pen--I know that however fiercely the storms may beat, however wildly the tempests may blow, however bitter the fighting hours of the day may be, beyond the heat and burden of it all will come the quiet eventide for me, and for all the sons and daughters of this prairie land I love. Though the roar of battle fill all the noontime, in the blessed twilight will come the music of "_HOME, SWEET HOME_."