"Yes, but I believe I'll go down the street first. Save a place for me. I want to see Dr. Hemingway next to you of all Springvale." Which was my second falsehood for that day. I needed prayer meeting.

The sunset hour was more than I could withstand. All the afternoon I had been subconsciously saying that I must keep close to the realities. These were all that counted now. And yet when the evening came, all the past swept my soul and bore every resolve before it. I did not stop to ask myself any questions. I only knew that, lonely as it must be, I must go now to "Rockport" as I had done so many times in the old happy past, a past I was already beginning numbly to feel was dead and gone forever. And yet my step was firm and my head erect, as with eager tread I came to the bushes guarding our old happy playground. I only wanted to see it once more, that was all.

The limp had gone from my foot. It was intermittent in the earlier years. I was combed and groomed again for social appearing. Aunt Candace had hung about my tie and the set of my coat, and for my old army head-gear she had resurrected the jaunty cap I had worn home from Massachusetts. With my hands in my pockets, whistling softly to abstract my thoughts, I slipped through the bushes and stood once more on "Rockport."

And there was Marjie, still looking dreamily out over the valley. She had not heard my step, so far away were her thoughts. And the picture, as I stood a moment looking at her – will the world to come hold anything more fair, I wondered. It was years ago, I know, but so clearly I recall it now it could have been a dream of yesterday. Before me were the gray rock, the dark-green valley, the gleaming waters of the Neosho, the silvery mist on the farther bluff iridescent with the pink tints of sunset reflected on the eastern sky, the quiet loveliness of the May twilight, and Marjie, beautiful with a girlish winsomeness, a woman's grace, a Madonna's tenderness.

"Were you waiting for me, dearie? I am a little late, but I am here at last."

I spoke softly, and she turned quickly at the sound of my voice. A look of dazed surprise as she leaped to her feet, and then the reality dawned upon her.

"Come, sweetheart," I said. "I have been away so long, I'm hungering for your welcome."

I held out my hands to her. Her face was very white as she made one step toward me, and then the love-light filled her brown eyes, the glorious beauty of the pink blossoms swept her cheek. I put my arms around her and drew her close to me, my own little girl, whom I had loved and thought I had lost forever.

"Oh, Phil, Phil, are you here again? Are you – " she put her little hand against my hair curling rebelliously over my cap's brim. "Are you mine once more?"

"Am I, Marjie? Six feet of me has come back; but, little girl, I have never been away. I have never let you go out of my life. It was only the mechanical action that went away. Phil Baronet stayed here! Oh, I know it now – I was acting out there; I was really living here with you, my Marjie, my own."

I held her in my arms as I spoke, and we looked out at the sweet sunset prairie. The big cottonwood, shapely as ever, was outlined against the horizon, which was illumined now with all the gorgeous grandeur of the May evening. The level rays of golden light fell on us, as we stood there, baptizing us with its splendor.

"Oh, Marjie, it was worth all the suffering and danger to have such a home-coming as this!" I kissed her lips and pushed back the little ringlets from her white forehead.

"It is vouchsafed to a man sometimes to know a bit of heaven here on earth," Father Le Claire had said to me out on this rock six years before. It was a bit of heaven that came down to me in the purple twilight of that May evening, and I lifted my face to the opal skies above me with a prayer of thankfulness for the love that was mine once more. In that hour of happiness we forgot that there was ever a storm cloud to darken the blue heavens, or ever a grief or a sin to mar the joy of living. We were young, and we were together. Over the valley swept the sweet tones of the Presbyterian Church bell. Marjie's face, radiant with light, was lifted to mine.

"I must go to prayer meeting, Phil. I shall see you again – to-morrow?" She put the question hesitatingly, even longingly.

"Yes, and to-night. Let's go together. I haven't been to prayer meeting regularly. We lost out on that on the Staked Plains."

"I must run home and comb my hair," she declared; and indeed it was a little tumbled. But from the night I first saw her, a little girl in her father's moving-wagon, with her pink sun-bonnet pushed back from her blowsy curls, her hair, however rebellious, was always a picture.

"Go ahead, little girl. I will run home, too. I forgot something. I will be down right away."

Going home, I may have walked on Cliff Street, but my head was in the clouds, and all the songs that the morning-stars sing together – all the music of the spheres – was playing itself out for me in the shadowy twilight as I went along.

At the gate Aunt Candace and my father were waiting for me.

"You needn't wait," I cried. "I will be there presently."

"Oh, joined the regular army this time," my father said, smiling. "Sorry we can't keep you, Phil." But I gave no heed to him.

"Aunt Candace," I said in a low voice. "May I see you just a minute? I want to get something."

"It's in the top drawer in my room, Phil. The key is in the little tray on my dresser," Aunt Candace said quietly. She always understood me.

When I reached the Whately home, Marjie was waiting for me at the gate. I took her little hand in my own strong big one.

"Will you wear it again for me, dearie?" I asked, holding up my mother's ring before her.

"Always and always, Phil," she murmured.

Isn't it Longfellow who speaks of "the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels," blossoming "in the infinite meadows of heaven"? They were all a-bloom that May night, and dewy and sweet lay the earth beneath them. We were a little late to prayer meeting. The choir was in its place and the audience was gathered in the pews. Judge Baronet always sat near the front, and my place was between him and Aunt Candace when I wasn't in the choir. Bess Anderson was just finishing a voluntary as we two went up the aisle together. I hadn't thought of making a sensation, I thought only of Marjie. Passing around the end of the chancel rail I gently led her by the arm up the three steps to the choir place, and turning, faced all the town as I went to my seat beside my father. I was as happy as a lover can be; but I didn't know how much of all this was written on my countenance, nor did I notice the intense hush that fell on the company. I had faced the oncoming of Roman Nose and his thousand Cheyenne warriors; there was no reason why I should feel embarrassed in a prayer meeting in the Presbyterian Church at Springvale. The service was short. I remember not one word of it except the scripture lesson. That was the Twenty-third Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me.

These words had sounded in my ears on the night before the battle on the Arickaree, and again in the little cove on the low bluff at Fort Sill, the night Jean Pahusca was taunting me through the few minutes he was allowing me to live. That Psalm belonged to the days when I was doing my part toward the price paid out for the prairie homes and safety and peace. But never anybody read for me as Dr. Hemingway read it that evening. With the close of the service came a prayer of thanksgiving for my return. Then for the first time I was self-conscious. What had I done to be so lovingly and reverently welcomed home? I bowed my head in deep humility, and the tears welled up. Oh, I could look death calmly between the eyes as I had watched it creeping toward me on the heated Plains of the Arickaree, and among the cold starved sand dunes of the Cimarron, but to be lauded as a hero here in Springvale – the tears would come. Where were Custer, and Moore, and Forsyth, and Pliley, and Stillwell, and Morton, if such as I be called a hero?

Cam Gentry didn't lead the Doxology that night, he chased it clear into the belfry and up into the very top of the steeple; and his closing burst of melody "Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," had, as Bill Mead declared afterwards, a regular "You-couldn't-have-done-it-better-Lord-if-you-had-been-there-yourself" ring to it.

Then came the benediction, fervent, holy, gentle, with Dr. Hemingway's white face (crowned now with snowy hair) lifted up toward heaven. After that I never could remember, save that there was a hush, then a clamor, that was followed pretty soon by embraces from the older men and women, pounding thumps from the younger men and handshaking with the girls. And all the while, with a proprietary sense I had found myself near Marjie, whom I kept close beside me now, her brown head just above my shoulder.

More than once in the decades since then it has been my fortune to return to Springvale and be met at the railway station and escorted home by the town band. Sometimes for political service, sometimes for civic effort, and once because by physical strength and great daring and quick cool courage I saved three human lives in a terrible wreck; but never any ovation was like that prayer meeting in the Presbyterian Church nearly forty years ago.

The days that followed my home-coming were busy ones, for my place in the office had been vacant. Clayton Anderson had devoted himself to the Whately affairs, although nobody but those in the secret knew when Judson gave up proprietorship and went on a clerk's pay again where he belonged. Springvale was kind to Judson, as it has always been to the man who tries honestly to make good in this life's struggle. It is in the Kansas air, this broader charity, this estimation of character, redeemed or redeemable.

My father did not tell me of his part in the Whately business affairs at once, and I did not understand when, one evening, some time later, Aunt Candace said at the supper table:

"Dollie Gentry tells me Dr. John (so we called John Anderson now), reports a twelve-pound boy over at Judsons'. They are going to christen him 'John Baronet Judson.' Aren't you proud of the name, John?"

"I am of the Judson part," my father answered, with that compression of the lips that sometimes kept back a smile, and sometimes marked a growing sternness.

I met O'mie at Topeka and brought him to Springvale. It was not until in May of the next year that he went away from us and came not back any more, save in loving remembrance.

In August Tillhurst went East. Somehow I was not at all surprised when the Rockport, Massachusetts, weekly newspaper, that had come to our house every Tuesday while we had lived on Cliff Street, contained the notice of the marriage of Richard Tillhurst and Rachel Agnes Melrose. The happy couple, the paper said, would reside in Rockport.

"They may reside at the bottom of the sea for all that I care," I said thoughtlessly, not understanding then the shadow that fell for the moment on my aunt's serene face.

Long afterwards when she slept beside my father in the quiet Springvale cemetery on the bluff beyond Fingal's Creek, I found among her letters the romance of her life. I knew then for the first time that Rachel's uncle, the Ferdinand Melrose whose life was lost at sea, was the one for whom this brave kind woman had mourned. Loving as the Baronets do, even unto death, she had gone down the lonely years, forgetting herself in the broad, beautiful, unselfish life she gave to those about her.

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 Washita. 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 Sweetwater 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 passes 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 Washita 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 asset 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 sturdy 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 God 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 assigns 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 grassy 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 God 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."