Buch lesen: «The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas», Seite 26

I have read the fascinating story of Coronado and his three hundred Spanish knights in their long weary march over a silent desolate level waste day after day, pushing grimly to the northward in their fruitless search for gold. What did this band of a thousand weary men go seeking as they took the reverse route of Coronado's to the Southwest over these ceaslessly crawling sands? Not the discoverer's fame, not the gold-seeker's treasure led them forth through gray interminable reaches of desolation. They were going now to put the indelible mark of conquest by a civilized Government, on a crafty and dangerous foe, to plough a fire-guard of safety about the frontier homes.

Small heed we gave to this history-making, it is true, as we pressed silently onward through those dreary late winter days. It was a soldier's task we had accepted, and we were following the flag. And in spite of the sins committed in its name, of the evil deeds protected by its power, wherever it unfurls its radiant waves of light "the breath of heaven smells wooingly"; gentle peace, and rich prosperity, and holy love abide ever more under its caressing shadow.

We were prepared with rations for a five days' expedition only. But weary, ragged, barefoot, hungry, sleepless, we pressed on through twenty-five days, following a trail sometimes dim, sometimes clearly written, through a region the Indians never dreamed we could cross and live. The nights chilled our famishing bodies. The short hours of broken rest led only to another day of moving on. There were no breakfasts to hinder our early starting. The meagre bit of mule meat doled out sparingly when there was enough of this luxury to be given out, eaten now without salt, was our only food. Our clothing tattered with wear and tear, hung on our gaunt frames. Our lips did not close over our teeth; our eyes above hollow cheeks stared out like the eyes of dead men. The bloom of health had turned to a sickly yellow hue; but we were all alike, and nobody noted the change.

As we passed from one deserted camp to another, it began to seem a will-o'-the-wisp business, an elusive dream, a long fruitless chasing after what would escape and leave us to perish at last in this desert. But the slender yellow-haired man at the head of the column had an indomitable spirit, and an endurance equalled only by his courage and his military cunning. Under him was the equally indomitable Kansas Colonel, Horace L. Moore, tried and trained in Plains warfare. Behind them straggled a thousand soldiers. And still the March days dragged on.

Then the trails began to tell us that the Indians were gathering in larger groups and the command was urged forward with more persistent purpose. We slept at night without covering under the open sky. We hardly dared to light fires. We had nothing to cook, and a fire would reveal our whereabouts to the Indians we were pursuing. A thousand soldiers is a large number; but even a thousand men, starving day after day, taxing nerve and muscle, with all the reserve force of the body feeding on its own unfed store of energy; a thousand men destitute of supplies, cut off by leagues of desert sands from any base of reinforcement, might put up only a weak defence against the hundreds of savages in their own habitat. It was to prevent another Arickaree that Custer's forces kept step in straggling lines when rations had become only a taunting mockery of the memory.

The map of that campaign is kept in the archives of war and its official tale is all told there, told as the commander saw it. I can tell it here only as a private down in the ranks.

In the middle of a March afternoon, as we were silently swinging forward over the level Plains, a low range of hills loomed up. Beyond them lay the valley of the Sweetwater, a tributary of the Canadian River. Here, secure in its tepees, was the Cheyenne village, its inhabitants never dreaming of the white man's patience and endurance. Fifteen hundred strong it numbered, arrogant, cunning, murderous. The sudden appearance of our army of skeleton men was not without its effect on the savage mind. Men who had crossed the Staked Plains in this winter time, men who looked like death already, such men might be hard to kill. But lying and trickery still availed.

There was only one mind in the file that day. We had come so far, we had suffered such horrors on the way, these men had been guilty of such atrocious crimes, we longed fiercely now to annihilate this band of wretches in punishment due for all it had cost the nation. I thought of the young mother and her baby boy on the frozen earth between the drifts of snow about Satanta's tepee on the banks of the Washita, as Bud and I found her on the December day when we searched over Custer's battle field. I pictured the still forms lying on their blankets, and the long line of soldiers passing reverently by, to see if by chance she might be known to any of us – this woman, murdered in the very hour of her release; and I gripped my arms in a frenzy. Oh, Satan takes fast hold on the heart of a man in such a time, and the Christ dying on the cross up on Calvary, praying "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," seems only a fireside story of unreal things.

In the midst of this opportunity for vengeance just, and long overdue, comes Custer's lieutenant with military courtesy to Colonel Moore, and delivers the message, "The General sends his compliments, with the instructions not to fire on the Indians."

Courtesy! Compliments! Refrain from any rudeness to the wards of the Government! I was nearly twenty-two and I knew more than Custer and Sheridan and even President Grant himself just then. I had a sense of obedience. John Baronet put that into me back in Springvale years ago. Also I had extravagant notions of military discipline and honor. But for one brief moment I was the most lawless mutineer, the rankest anarchist that ever thirsted for human gore to satisfy a wrong. Nor was I alone. Beside me were those stanch fellows, Pete and John Mac, and Hadley. And beyond was the whole line of Kansas men with a cause of their own here. Before my fury left me, however, we were all about face, and getting up the valley to a camping-place.

I might have saved the strength the passion of fury costs. Custer knew his business and mine also. Down in that Cheyenne village, closely guarded, were two captive women, the women of my boyhood dream, maybe. The same two women who had been carried from their homes up in the Solomon River country in the early Fall. What they had endured in these months of captivity even the war records that set down plain things do not deem fit to enter. One shot from our rifles that day on the Sweetwater would have meant for them the same fate that befell the sacrifice on the Washita, the dead woman on the deserted battle field. It was to save these two, then, that we had kept step heavily across the cold starved Plains. For two women we had marched and suffered on day after day. Who shall say, at the last analysis, that this young queen of nations, ruling a beautiful land under the Stars and Stripes, sets no value on the homes of its people, nor holds as priceless the life and safety even of two unknown women.

Very adroitly General Custer visited, and exchanged compliments, and parleyed and waited, playing his game faultlessly till even the quick-witted Cheyennes were caught by it. When the precise moment came the shrewd commander seized the chief men of the village and gave his ultimatum – a life for a life. The two white women safe from harm must be brought to him or these mighty men must become degraded captives. Then followed an Indian hurricane of wrath and prayers and trickery. It availed nothing except to prolong the hours, and hunger and cold filled another night in our desolate camp.

Day brought a renewal of demand, a renewal of excuse and delay and an attempt to outwit by promises. But a second command was more telling. The yellow-haired general's word now went forth: "If by sunset to-morrow night these two women are not returned to my possession, these chiefs will hang."

So Custer said, and the grim selection of the gallows and the preparation for fulfilment of his threat went swiftly forward. The chiefs were terror-stricken, and anxious messages were sent to their people. Meanwhile the Cheyenne forces were moving farther and farther away. The squaws and children were being taken to a safe distance, and a quick flight was in preparation. So another night of hunger and waiting fell upon us. Then came the day of my dream long ago. The same people I knew first on the night after Jean Pahusca's attempt on Marjie's life, when we were hunting our cows out on the West Prairie, came now in reality before me.

The Sweetwater Valley spread out under the late sunshine of a March day was rimmed about by low hills. Beyond these, again, were the Plains, the same monotony of earth beneath and sky above, the two meeting away and away in an amethyst fold of mist around the world's far bound. There were touches of green in the brown valley, but the hill slopes and all the spread of land about them were gray and splotched and dull against a blue-gray sickly sky. The hours went by slowly to each anxious soldier, for endurance was almost at its limit. More heavily still they must have dragged for the man on whom the burden of command rested. High noon, and then the afternoon interminably long and dull, and by and by came the sunset on the Sweetwater Valley, and a new heaven and a new earth were revealed to the sons of men. Like a chariot of fire, the great sun rolled in all its gorgeous beauty down the west. The eastern sky grew radiant with a pink splendor, and every brown and mottled stretch of distant landscape was touched with golden light or deepened into richest purple, or set with a roseate bound of flame. Somewhere far away, a feathery gray mist hung like a silvery veil toning down the earth from the noonday glare to the sunset glory. Down in the very middle of all this was a band of a thousand men; their faded clothing, their uncertain step, their knotted hands, and their great hungry eyes told the price that had been paid for the drama this sunset hour was to bring. Slowly the moments passed as when in our little sanctuary above the pleasant parks at Fort Sill I had watched the light measured out. And then the low hills began to rise up and shut out the crimson west as twilight crept toward the Sweetwater Valley.

Suddenly, for there had been nothing there a moment before, all suddenly, an Indian scout was outlined on the top of the low bluff nearest us. Motionless he sat on his pony a moment, then he waved a signal to the farther height beyond him. A second pony and a second Indian scout appeared. Another signal and then came a third Indian on a third pony farther away. Each Indian seemed to call out another until a line of them had been signalled from the purple mist, out of which they appeared to be created. Last of all and farthest away, was a pony on which two figures were faintly outlined. Down in the valley we waited, all eyes looking toward the hills as these two drew nearer. Up in a group on the bluff beyond the valley the Indians halted. The two riders of the pony slipped to the ground. With their arms about each other, in close embrace, they came slowly toward us, the two captive women for whom we waited. It was a tragic scene, such as our history has rarely known, watched by a thousand men, mute and motionless, under its spell. Even now, after the lapse of nearly four decades, the picture is as vivid as if it were but yesterday that I stood on the Texas Plains a soldier of twenty-two years, feeling my heart throbs quicken as that sunset scene is enacted before me.

We had thought ourselves the victims of a hard fate in that winter of terrible suffering; but these two women, Kansas girls, no older than Marjie, home-loving, sheltered, womanly, a maiden and a bride of only a few months – shall I ever forget them as they walked into my life on that March day in the sunset hour by the Sweetwater? Their meagre clothing was of thin flour sacks with buckskin moccasins and leggins. Their hair hung in braids Indian fashion. Their haggard faces and sad eyes told only the beginning of their story. They were coming now to freedom and protection. The shadow of Old Glory would be on them in a moment; a moment, and the life of an Indian captive would be but a horror-seared memory.

Then it was that Custer did a graceful thing. The subjection of the Cheyennes could have been accomplished by soldiery from Connecticut or South Carolina, but it was for the rescue of these two, for the protection of Kansas homes, that the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry had volunteered. Stepping to our commander, Colonel Moore, Custer asked that the Kansas man should go forward to meet the captives. With a courtesy a queen might have coveted the Colonel received them – two half-naked, wretched, fate-buffeted women.

The officers nearest wrapped their great coats about them. Then, as the two, escorted by Colonel Moore and his officers next of rank, moved forward toward General Custer, who was standing apart on a little knoll waiting to receive them, a thousand men watching breathless with uncovered heads the while, the setting sun sent down athwart the valley its last rich rays of glory, the motionless air was full of an opalescent beauty; while softly, sweetly, like dream music never heard before in that lonely land of silence, the splendid Seventh Cavalry band was playing "Home Sweet Home."

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HERITAGE

 
It is morning here in Kansas, and the breakfast bell is rung!
We are not yet fairly started on the work we mean to do;
We have all the day before us, and the morning is but young,
And there's hope in every zephyr, and the skies are bright and blue.
 

– WALT MASON.

It was over at last, the long painful marching; the fight with the winter's blizzard, the struggle with starvation, the sunrise and sunset and starlight on wilderness ways – all ended after a while. Of the three boys who had gone out from Springvale and joined in the sacrifice for the frontier, Bud sleeps in that pleasant country at Fort Sill. The summer breezes ripple the grasses on his grave, the sunbeams caress it lovingly and the winter snows cover it softly over – the quiet grave he had wished for and found all too soon. Dear Bud, "not changed, but glorified," he holds his place in all our hearts. For O'mie, the winter campaign was the closing act of a comic tragedy, and I can never think sadly of the brave-hearted happy Irishman. He was too full of the sunny joy of existence, his heart beat with too much of good-will toward men, to be remembered otherwise than as a bright-faced, sweet-spirited boy whose span of years was short. How he ever endured the hardships and reached Springvale again is a miracle, and I wonder even now, how, waiting patiently for the inevitable, he could go peacefully through the hours, making us forget everything but his cheery laugh, his affectionate appreciation of the good things of the world, and his childlike trust in the Saviour of men.

His will was a simple thing, containing the bequest of all his possessions, including the half-section of land so long in litigation, and the requests regarding his funeral. The latter had three wishes: that Marjie would sing "Abide With Me" at the burial service, that he might lie near to John Baronet's last resting-place in the Springvale cemetery, and that Dave and Bill Mead, and the three Andersons, with myself would be his pall bearers. Dave was on the Pacific slope then, and O'mie himself had helped to bear Bud to his final earthly home. One of the Red Range boys and Jim Conlow filled these vacant places. Reverently, as for one of the town's distinguished men, there walked beside us Father Le Claire and Judge Baronet, Cris Mead and Henry Anderson, father of the Anderson boys, Cam Gentry and Dever. Behind these came the whole of Springvale. It was May time, a year after our Southwest campaign, and the wild flowers of the prairie lined his grave and wreaths of the pink blossoms that grow out in the West Draw were twined about his casket. He had no next of kin, there were no especial mourners. His battle was ended and we could not grieve for his abundant entrance into eternal peace.

Three of us had gone out with the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry, and I am the third. While we were creeping back to life at Camp Inman on the Washita after that well-nigh fatal expedition across the Staked Plains to the Sweetwater, I saw much of Hard Rope, chief man of the Osage scouts. I had been accustomed to the Osages all my years in Kansas. Neither this tribe, nor our nearer neighbors, the Kaws, had ever given Springvale any serious concern. Sober, they were law-abiding enough, and drunk, they were no more dangerous than any drunken white man. Bitter as my experience with the Indian has been, I have always respected the loyal Osage. But I never sought one of this or any other Indian tribe for the sake of his company. Race prejudice in me is still strong, even when I give admiration and justice free rein. Indians had frequent business in the Baronet law office in my earlier years, and after I was associated with my father there was much that brought them to us. Possibly the fact that I did not dislike the Osages is the reason I hardly gave them a thought at Fort Sill. It was not until afterwards that I recalled how often I had found the Osage scouts there crossing my path unexpectedly. On the day before we broke camp at the Fort, Hard Rope came to my tent and sat down beside the door. I did not notice him until he said slowly:

"Baronet?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Tobacco?" he asked.

"No, Hard Rope," I answered, "I have every other mark of a great man except this. I don't smoke."

"I want tobacco," he continued.

What made me accommodating just then I do not know, but I suddenly remembered some tobacco that Reed had left in my tent.

"Hard Rope," I said, "here is some tobacco. I forgot I had it, because I don't care for it. Take it all."

The scout seized it with as much gratitude as an Indian shows, but he did not go away at once.

"Something else now?" I questioned not unkindly.

"You Judge Baronet's son?"

I nodded and smiled.

He came very close to me, putting both hands on my shoulders, and looking steadily into my eyes he said solemnly, "You will be safe. No evil come near you."

"Thank you, Hard Rope, but I will keep my powder dry just the same," I answered.

All the time in the Inman camp the scout shadowed me. On the evening before our start for Fort Hays to be mustered out of service he came to me as I sat alone beside the Washita, breathing deeply the warm air of an April twilight. I had heard no word from home since I left Topeka in October. Marjie must be married, as Jean had said. I had never known the half-breed to tell a lie. It was so long ago that that letter of hers to me had miscarried. She thought of course that I had taken it and even then refused to stay at home. Oh, it was all a hopeless tangle, and now I might be dreaming of another man's wife. I had somehow grown utterly hopeless now. Jean – oh, the thought was torture – I could not feel sure about him. He might be shadowing her night and day. Custer did not tell me what had become of the Indian, and I had seen on the Sweetwater what such as he could do for a Kansas girl. As I sat thus thinking, Hard Rope squatted beside me.

"You go at sunrise?" pointing toward the east.

I merely nodded.

"I want to talk," he went on.

"Well, talk away, Hard Rope." I was glad to quit thinking.

What he told me there by the rippling Washita River I did not repeat for many months, but I wrung his hand when I said good-bye. Of all the scouts with Custer that we left behind when we started northward, none had so large a present of tobacco as Hard Rope.

My father had demanded that I return to Springvale as soon as our regiment was mustered out. Morton was still in the East, and I had no foothold in the Saline Valley as I had hoped in the Fall to have. Nor was there any other place that opened its doors to me. And withal I was homesick – desperately, ravenously homesick. I wanted to see my father and Aunt Candace, to look once more on the peaceful Neosho and the huge oak trees down in its fertile valley. For nearly half a year I had not seen a house, nor known a civilized luxury. No child ever yearned for home and mother as I longed for Springvale. And most of all came an overwhelming eagerness to see Marjie once more. She was probably Mrs. Judson now, unless Jean – but Hard Rope had eased my mind a little there – and I had no right even to think of her. Only I was young, and I had loved her so long. All that fierce battle with myself which I fought out on the West Prairie on the night she refused to let me speak to her had to be fought over again. And this time, marching northward over the April Plains toward Fort Hays, this time, I was hopelessly vanquished. I, Philip Baronet, who had fought with fifty against a thousand on the Arickaree; who had gone with Custer to the Sweetwater in the dreary wastes of the Texas desert; I who had a little limp now and then in my right foot, left out too long in the cold, too long made to keep step in weary ways on endlessly wearing marches; I who had lost the softness of the boy's physique and who was muscled like a man, with something of the military bearing hammered mercilessly upon me in the days of soldier life – I was still madly in love with a girl who had refused all my pleadings and was even now, maybe, another man's wife. Oh, cold and terror and starvation were all bad enough, but this was unendurable.

"I will go home as my father wishes," I said. "I do not need to stay there, but I will go now for a while and feel once more what civilization means. Then – I will go to the Plains, or somewhere else." So I argued as we came one April day into Fort Hays. Letters from home were awaiting me, urging me to come at once; and I went, leaving O'mie to follow later when he should have rested at the Fort a little.

All Kansas was in its Maytime glory. From the freshly ploughed earth came up that sweet wholesome odor that like the scent of new-mown hay carries its own traditions of other days to each of us. The young orchards – there were not many orchards in Kansas then – were all a blur of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended with the shifting shades of green. Along the waterways the cottonwood's silvery branches, tipped with tender young leaves fluttering in the soft wind, stood up proudly above the scrubby bronze and purple growths hardly yet in bud and leaf. From every gentle swell the landscape swept away to the vanishing line of distances in billowy seas of green and gold, while far overhead arched the deep-blue skies of May. Fleecy clouds, white and soft as foam, drifted about in the limitless fields of ether. The glory of the new year, the fresh sweet air, the spirit of budding life, set the pulses a-tingle with the very joy of being. Like a dream of Paradise lay the Neosho Valley in its wooded beauty, with field and farm, the meadow, and the open unending prairie rolling away from it, wave on wave, in the Maytime grace and grandeur. Through this valley the river itself wound in and out, glistening like molten silver in the open spaces, and gliding still and shadowy by overhanging cliff and wooded covert.

"Dever," I said to the stage driver when we had reached the top of the divide and looked southward to where all this magnificence of nature was lavishly spread out, "Dever, do you remember that passage in the Bible about the making of the world long ago, 'And God saw that it was good'? Well, here's where all that happened."

Dever laughed a crowing laugh of joy. He had hugged me when I took the stage, I didn't know why. When it came to doing the nice thing, Dever had a sense of propriety sometimes that better-bred folk might have envied. And this journey home proved it.

"I've got a errant up west. D'ye's lief come into town that way?" he asked me.

Would I? I was longing to slip into my home before I ran the gantlet of all the streets opening on the Santa Fé Trail. I never did know what Dever's "errant" was, that led him to swing some miles to the west, out of the way to the ford of the Neosho above the old stone cabin where Father Le Claire swam his horse in the May flood six years before. He gave no reason for the act that brought me over a road, every foot sacred to the happiest moments of my life. Past the big cottonwood, down into the West Draw where the pink blossoms called in sweet insistent tones to me to remember a day when I had crowned a little girl with blooms like these, a day when my life was in its Maytime joy. On across the prairie we swung to the very borders of Springvale, which was nestling by the river and stretching up the hillslope toward where the bluff breaks abruptly. I could see "Rockport" gray and sun-flecked beyond its sheltering line of green bushes.

Just as we turned toward Cliff Street Dever said carelessly,

"Lots of changes some ways sence I took you out of here last August. Judson, he's married two months ago."

The warm sunny glorious world turned drab and cold to me with the words.

"What's the matter, Baronet? – you're whiter'n a dead man!"

"Just a little faint. Got that way in the army," I answered, which was a lie.

"Better now? As I was sayin', Judson and Lettie has been married two months now. Kinder surprised folks by jinin' up sudden; but – oh, well, it's a lot better quick than not at all sometimes."

I caught my breath. My "spell" contracted in the army was passing. And here were Cliff Street and the round turret-like corners of Judge Baronet's stone-built domicile. It was high noon, and my father had just gone into the house. I gave Dever his fare and made the hall door at a leap. My father turned at the sound and – I was in his arms. Then came Aunt Candace, older by more than ten months. Oh, the women are the ones who suffer most. I had not thought until that moment what all this winter of absence meant to Candace Baronet. I held her in my strong arms and looked down into her love-hungry eyes. Men are such stupid unfeeling brutes. I am, at least; for I had never read in this dear woman's face until that instant what must have been written there all these years, – the love that might have been given to a husband and children of her own, this lonely, childless woman had given to me.

"Aunty, I'll never leave you again," I declared, as she clung to me, and patted my cheeks and stroked my rough curly hair.

We sat down together to the midday meal, and my father's blessing was like the benediction of Heaven to my ears.

Springvale also had its measure of good breeding. My coming was the choicest news that Dever had had to give out for many a day, and the circulation was amazing in its rapid transit. I had a host of friends here where I had grown to manhood, and the first impulse was to take Cliff Street by storm. It was Cam Gentry who counselled better methods.

"Now, by hen, let's have some sense," he urged, "the boy's jest got here. He's ben through life and death, er tarnation nigh akin to it. Let's let him be with his own till to-morror. Jest ac like we'd had a grain o' raisin' anyhow, and wait our turn. Ef he shows hisself down on this 'er street we'll jest go out and turn the Neoshy runnin' north for an hour and a half while we carry him around dry shod. But now, to-day, let him come out o' hidin', and we'll give him welcome; but ef he stays up there with Candace, we'll be gentlemen fur oncet ef it does purty nigh kill some of us."

"Cam is right," Cris Mead urged. "If he comes down here he'll take his chances, but we'll hold our fire on the hill till to-morrow."

"Well, by cracky, the Baronets never miss prayer meeting, I guess. Springvale will turn out to-night some," Grandpa Mead declared.

And so while I revelled in a home-coming, thankful to be alone with my own people, the best folks on earth were waiting and dodging about, but courteously abstaining from rushing in on our sacred home rights.

In the middle of the afternoon Cam Gentry called to Dollie to come to his aid.

"Jest tie the end of this rope good and fast around this piazzer post," he said.

His wife obeyed before she noted that the other end was fastened around Cam's right ankle. To her wondering look he responded:

"Ef I don't lariat myself to something, like a old hen wanting to steal off with her chickens, I'll be up to Baronet's spite of my efforts, I'm that crazy to see Phil once more."

Through the remainder of the May afternoon he sat on the veranda, or hopped the length of his tether to the side-walk and looked longingly up toward the high street, that faced the cliff, but his purpose did not change.

Springvale showed its sense of delicacy in more ways than this. Marjie was the last to hear of my leaving when all suddenly I turned my back on the town nearly ten months before. And now, while almost every family had discussed my return – anything furnishes a little town a sensation – the Whately family had had no notice served of the momentarily interesting topic. And so it was that Marjie, innocent of the suppressed interest, went about her home, never dreaming of anything unusual in the town talk of that day.

The May evening was delicious in its balmy air and the deepening purple of its twilight haze. The spirit of the springtime, wooing in its tone of softest music, voiced a message to the sons and daughters of men. Marjie came out at sunset and slowly took her way through the sweetness of it all up to the "Rockport" of our childhood, the trysting place of our days of love's young dream. Her fair face had a womanly strength and tenderness now, and her form an added grace over the curves of girlhood. But her hair still rippled about her brow and coiled in the same soft folds of brown at the back of her head. Her cheeks had still the pink of the wild rose bloom, and the dainty neatness in dress was as of old.