LITMIR.BIZ

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long those twenty men sat there, gazing at that mute, motionless figure on the ground not one could have told. Death was no stranger to them. For years it had lurked behind every chance shrub they passed, in the depths of every ravine, in the darkness of night, from every tangle of rank prairie grass in broad daylight. To it from long familiarity they had become callous; but death such as this, deliberate, cold-blooded, self-inflicted—it awed them while it fascinated, held them silent, passive.

      "In God's name!" Again it was Landor who roused them, Landor with his hand on the holster at his hip, Landor who sat staring as one who doubts his own sight. "Am I sane, men? Look, there to your right!"

      They looked. They rubbed their eyes and looked again.

      "Well, I'll be damned," voiced Crosby; and no man had ever heard him express surprise before. To the north, from the edge of the tall surrounding grass, moving slowly, yet without a trace of hesitation or of fear, coming straight toward them across the trampled earth, were two tiny human figures, hand in hand. No wonder they who saw stared; no wonder they doubted their eyes. One, the figure to the right, was plump and uncertain of step and all in white; white which in the moonlight and against the black earth seemed ghostly. The other was slim and certain of movement and dark—dark as a copper brown Indian boy, naked as when he came on earth. On they came, the brown figure leading, the white following trustfully, until they were quite up to the watchers, halted, still hand in hand.

      "How," said a voice, a piping childish voice.

      Like rustics at a spectacle the men stared, turned mystified faces each to each, and stared anew. All save one. Off from his horse sprang Landor, caught the bundle of white in his arms.

      "Baby Rowland! Baby Bess! And you,"—he was staring the other from head to toe, the distance was short,—"who are you?"

      "Uncle Billy," interrupting, ignoring, the tiny bit of femininity nestled close, "Uncle Billy, where's papa and mamma! I want them."

      Closer and closer the big bachelor arms clasped their burden; unashamed, there with the others watching him, he kissed her.

      "Never mind now, Kiddie. Tell me how you came here, and who this is with you."

      About the great neck crept two arms, clinging tightly.

      "He just came, Uncle Billy. I was calling for papa. Papa put me to sleep and forgot me. The boy heard me and took me out. I was afraid at first, but—but he's a nice boy, only he won't talk and—and—" The narrative halted, the tousled head buried itself joyously. "Oh, I'm so glad you came, Uncle Billy!"

      In silence Landor's eyes made the circle of interested watching faces, returned to the winsome brown face so near his own.

      "Aren't you hungry, Kid?" he ventured.

      On his shoulder the dark poll shook a negative.

      "No. We had corn to eat. The boy roasted it. He made a big fire. He's a nice boy, only—only he won't say anything."

      Again Landor's eyes made the circle, halted at the intrepid brown waif who, that first word of greeting spoken, had silently stared him back.

      "You're sure you don't know anything more, baby? You didn't hear anything until the boy came?"

      "No, Uncle Billy. I was asleep. When I woke up it was dark, and I was hungry and—and—" At last it had come: the spattering, turbulent tear storm. Her small body shook, her arms clasped tighter and tighter. "Oh, Uncle Billy, I want my papa and mamma. I tried to find them, and I couldn't. Please find them for me, Uncle Billy, Please! Please!"

      It was well past midnight. The big full moon, high now in the sky, cast their shadows almost about their feet when, their labour complete, the party took up the homeward trail. But there were twenty no longer. At their head as before rode Landor, in his arms not a rifle but a blanket; a blanket from which as they journeyed on came now and anon a sound that was alien indeed: the sobs of a baby girl who wept as she slept. Back of him, likewise as when they had come, rode hatchet-faced Crosby; but he, too, was not as before. His saddle had been removed and, in front of him, astride the horse's bare back, warmed by the animal heat, was a brown waif of a boy; not asleep or even drowsy, but wide awake indeed, silently watchful as a prairie owl of every movement about him, every low-spoken word. What whim of satirist chance had put him there, what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know, could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal. Slowly now, weary to death with the long, long day, depressed with the inevitable reaction from the excitement of the past hours, they moved away, to the south, to the west. In front of them, glittering in the moonlight, seemingly infinite, stretched the waves of the rolling prairie, bare as the sea in a calm. Behind them, growing lesser and lesser minute by minute, merging into the infinite white, were three black dots like tiny boats on the horizon's edge. On they went, a half mile, a mile, looked behind; and, with an awe no familiarity could prevent, faced ahead anew. Back of them now as well as before, uniformly endless, uniformly magnificent, stretched that giant ocean: silent, serene, as mother nature, as nature's master, God himself.

      Chapter IV.

       Reconstruction

       Table of Contents

      The day of the Indian terror had passed. No longer did the name of Little Crow carry stampede in its wake. The battles of Big Mound, of White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run. Still in the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited massacre of Custer at the Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse, and of Gall, who had made the last great encounter bloodily unique in the conflict of the red man and the white, was never to be duplicated. Rightly or wrongly deprived of what they had once called their own, driven back, back on the crest of the ever-increasing wave of settlement, facing the alternative of annihilation or of submergence in that flood, the Sioux had halted like a wild thing at bay, with their backs to the last stronghold, the richest plot of earth on the face of the globe, the Black Hills country, and as a cornered animal ever fights, had battled ferociously for a lost supremacy. But, robbers themselves, holding the land on the insecure title of might alone, fighting to the end, they had at last succumbed to the inevitable: the all-conquering invasion of the dominant Anglo-Saxon. Here and there a name stood out: "Scarlet Point," "Strikes-the-Ree," "Little Crow," "Sitting Bull," "Crazy Horse," "Spotted Tail," "Red Cloud," "Gall," "John Grass," names that in multiple impressed but by their fantastic suggestion; but their original pulse-accelerating meaning had long since passed. Now and then a prairie mother, driven to desperation, might incite temporary rectitude in the breast of an incorrigible by a harrowing reference to one or to another; yet to the incoming swarms of land-hungry settlers they were mere supplanted play actors, fit heroes for fiction, for romance perhaps; but like the bison to be kept in small herds safe in the pasture of a reservation, preserved as a relic of a species doomed to extinction.

      A thing at which to marvel was the growth of the eastern border of Dakota Territory in this, the time of the great boom. History can scarcely find its parallel. In the space of a decade the census leaped from two-score thousand to nearly a half million. New towns sprang up like fungi in a night. Railroads reached out like the tentacles of an octopus, where a generation before the buffalo had tramped its tortuous trail. Prosperous farms came into being in the meadows where the antelope had pastured. Artesian wells, waterworks, electric lights, street railways, colleges, all the adjuncts of a higher civilisation, blossomed forth under the magic wand of Eastern capital. Doomed to reaction, as an advancing pendulum is doomed to retrace its cycle, was this premature evolution; but temporarily, as a springtime freshet bears onward the driftwood in its path, it carried its predecessor, the unconventional, fighting, wild-loving adventurer, before. On it went, on and on until at last, fairly blocking its path, was the big, muddy, dawdling Missouri. Then for the first time it halted; halted in a pause that was to last for a generation. But it had fulfilled its mission. High and dry on the western side of the barrier, imbued as when they had settled to the east, with

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