I shall never forget the long hours of that night beside the Walnut, nor Beverly Clarenden’s face as he bent over the suffering men.  For all of us who were well worked mightily to save our plague-stricken comrades, whose couches were of prairie grass and whose hospital roof was the starlit sky.  However forgetful Beverly might be of names and faces, his strong hand had that soothing firmness that eased the agony of cramping limbs.  Dear Bev!  He comforted the sick, and caught the dying words, and straightened the relaxed bodies of the dead, and smiled next day, and forgot that he had done it.

At last the night of horror passed, and day came, wan and hot and weary out of the east.  But five of our comrades would see no earthly day again; and three dozen strong men of the day before lay stretched upon the ground, pulseless and shrunken and purple, with wrinkled skin and wide, unseeing eyes.

Before the sun had risen our dead, coffined only by their army blankets, lay in unmarked graves.  Our helpless living were placed in commissary wagons, and we took the trail slowly and painfully toward the Arkansas River.

If Charley Bent had gathered up his band to strike that night there would have been a different chapter in the annals of the plains.

I cannot follow with my pen the long marches of that campaign, and there was no honorable nor glorious warfare in it.  It is a story of skirmishes, not of battles; of attack and repulse; of ambush and pursuit and retreat.  It is a story of long days under burning skies, by whose fierce glare our brains seemed shriveling up and the world went black before our heat-bleared eyes.  A story of hard night-rides, when weary bodies fought with watchful minds the grim struggle that drowsiness can wage, though sleep, we knew, meant death.  It is a story of fevered limbs and bursting pulse in hospitals whose walls were prairie distances.  A story of hunger, and exhausted rations; of choking thirst, with only alkali water mocking at us.  And never could the story all be told.  There is no rest for cavalrymen in the field.  We did not suffer heavy loss, but here and there our comrades fell, by ones, and twos, at duty’s post; and where they fell they lie, in wayside graves, waiting for glorious mention until the last reveille shall sound above the battlements of heaven.

And I was one among these vanguards of the plains, making the old Santa Fe Trail safe for the feet of trade; and the wide Kansas prairies safe for homes, and happiness, and hope, and power.  I lived the life, and toughened in its grind.  But in my dreams sometimes my other life returned to me, and a sweet face, with a cloud of golden hair, and dark eyes looking into mine, came like a benediction to me.  Another face came sometimes now—­black, big, and glistening, with eyes of strange, far vision looking at me, and I heard, over and over, the words of Esmond Clarenden’s cook: 

“If you get into trouble, Mr. Bev, I’ll come, hot streaks, to help you.”