Toward the Hill of Dreams Franklin journeyed, because it had been written.  As he travelled over the long miles he scarcely noted the fields, the fences, the flocks and herds now clinging along the path of the iron rails.  He crossed the trails of the departed buffalo and of the vanishing cattle, but his mind looked only forward, and he saw these records of the past but dimly.  There, on the Hill of Dreams, he knew, there was answer for him if he sufficiently besought; that answer not yet learned in all the varying days.  It seemed sure to him that he should have a sign.[*]

Franklin looked out over a deserted and solitary land as he rode up to the foot of the hill.  There were no longer banners of dust where the wild game swept by, nor did the eye catch any line of distant horsemen.  It was another day.  Yet, as did the candidate of old, he left his horse at the foot of the hill and went up quite alone.

It was afternoon as he sat down.  The silence and solitude folded him about, and the sun sank so fitly slow that he hardly knew, and the solemn night swept softly on. . . .  Then he built a little fire. . . .  In the night, after many hours, he arose and lifted up his hands. . . .  At the foot of the hill the pony stopped cropping grass, tossed his head, and looked up intently at the summit.

It was morning.  The sun rose calm and strong.  The solitary figure upon the hill sat motionless, looking out.  There might have passed before him a perspective of the past, the Plains peopled with their former life; the oncoming of the white men from below; the remnant of the passing Latin race, typified in the unguided giant who, savage with savage, fought here near by, one brutal force meeting another and both passing before one higher and yet more strong.  To this watcher it seemed that he looked out from the halfway point of the nation, from the halfway house of a nation’s irresistible development.

Franklin had taken with him a small canteen of water, but bethinking himself that as of old the young man beseeching his dream neither ate nor drank until he had his desire, he poured out the water at his side as he sat in the dark.  The place was covered with small objects, bits of strewn shells and beads and torn “medicine bundles”—­pieces of things once held dear in earlier minds.  He felt his hand fall by accident upon some small object which had been wetted by the wasted water.  Later, in the crude light of the tiny flame which he had kindled, this lump of earth assumed, to his exalted fancy, the grim features of an Indian chieftain, wide-jawed, be-tufted, with low brow, great mouth, and lock of life’s price hanging down the neck.  All the fearlessness, the mournfulness, the mysticism of the Indian face was there.  Franklin always said that he had worked at this unconsciously, kneading the lump between his fingers, and giving it no thought other than that it felt cooling to his hand and restful to his mind.  Yet here, born ultimately of the travail of a higher mind, was a man from another time, in whose gaze sat the prescience of a coming day.  The past and the future thus were bridged, as may be done only by Art, the enduring, the uncalendared, the imperishable.