Aunty Boone’s eyes narrowed and there was a strange light in them as she looked at us, saying: 

“You get into trouble, Mr. Bev, you see me comin’, hot streaks, to help you out.  Whoo-ee!”

She breathed her weird, African whoop and turned away.

“I’ll depend on you.”  Beverly’s face was bright, and there was no shadow in his eyes, as he called after her retreating form.

We chatted long together, and I hoped—­and feared—­to have him tell me the story of his suit with Eloise, and why in such a day, of all the days of his life, he should choose to run away to the warfare of the frontier.  He could not have failed, I thought.  Never a disappointed lover wore a smile like this.  But Beverly had no story to tell me that night.

* * * * *

The mid-July sun was shining down on a treeless landscape, across which the yellow, foam-flecked Smoky Hill River wound its sinuous way.  Beside this stream was old Fort Harker, a low quadrangle of quarters, for military man and beast, grouped about a parade-ground for companionship rather than for protection.  The frontier fort had little need for defensive strength.  About its walls the Indian crawled submissively, fearful of munitions and authority.  It was not here, but out on lonely trails, in sudden ambush, or in overwhelming numbers, or where long miles, cut off from water, or exhausting distance banished safe retreat, that the savage struck in all his fury.

Eastward from Harker the scattered frontier homesteads crouched, defenseless, in the river valleys.  Far to the northwest spread the desolate lengths of a silent land where the white man’s foot had hardly yet been set.  Miles away to the southwest the Santa Fe Trail wound among the Arkansas sand-hills, never, in all its history, less safe for freighters than in that summer of 1867.

In this vast demesne the raiding Cheyenne, the cruel Kiowa, the blood-thirsty Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching civilization of the dominant Anglo-American.  The lonely trails were measured off by white men’s graves.  The vagrant winds that bear the odor of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten.  The story of that struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism and endurance.  In it the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry played a stirring part.

It seems but yesterday to me now, that July day so many years ago, when our four companies, numbering fewer than four hundred men, detrained from the Union Pacific train at Fort Harker on the Smoky Hill.  And the faces of the men who were to lead us are clear in memory.  Our commander, Colonel Moore, always brave and able; and our captains, Henry Lindsay, and Edgar Barker, and George Jenness, and David Payne,