Yet ever a chill struck Franklin’s soul as he thought of the lost battle at the Halfway House.  There was now grass grown upon the dusty trail that once led up to the low-eaved house.  The green and gray of Nature were shrouding busily the two lonely graves of those who had fought the, frontier and been vanquished in that night of terror, when the old West claimed its own.  The Halfway House of old was but a memory.  It had served its purpose, had fulfilled its mission, and those who once ruled it now were gone.  The wild herds and the wild men came there no longer, and there were neither hosts nor those needing hospitality.  And Mary Ellen, the stately visitant of his sleeping or his waking dreams, no longer might be seen in person at the Halfway House.  Recreant, defeated, but still refusing aid, she had gone back to her land of flowers.  It was Franklin’s one comfort that she had never known into whose hands had passed—­at a price far beyond their actual worth—­the lands of the Halfway House, which had so rapidly built up for her a competency, which had cleared her of poverty, only to re-enforce her in her pride.

Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the crucial moment of his life.  His nature was not more imaginative than comprehensive.

To a very few men Edward Franklin has admitted that he once dreamed of a hill topped by a little fire, whose smoke dipped and waved and caught him in its fold.  In brief, he got into saddle, and journeyed to the Hill of Dreams.

The Hill of Dreams dominated the wide and level landscape over which it had looked out through hundreds of slow, unnoted years.  From it once rose the signal smokes of the red men, and here it was that many a sentinel had stood in times long before a white face was ever seen upon the Plains.  Here often was erected the praying lodge of the young aspirant for wisdom, who stood there and lifted up his hands, saying:  “O sun!  O air!  O earth!  O spirits, hear me pray!  Give me aid, give me wisdom, so that I may know!”

Here on the Hill of Dreams, whence the eye might sweep to the fringed sand hills on the south, east to the river many miles away, and north and west almost to the swell of the cold steppes that lead up to the Rocky Range, the red men had sometimes come to lay their leaders when their day of hunting and of war was over.  Thus the place came to have extraordinary and mysterious qualities ascribed to it, on which account, in times gone by, men who were restless, troubled, disturbed, dissatisfied, came thither to fast and pray.  Here they builded their little fires, and here, night and day, they besought the sky, the sun, the firmament to send to them each his “dream,” his unseen counsellor, which should speak to him out of its more than earthly wisdom.