The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas

Would I? I was longing to slip into my home before I ran the gantlet of all the streets opening on the Santa Fé Trail. I never did know what Dever's "errant" was, that led him to swing some miles to the west, out of the way to the ford of the Neosho above the old stone cabin where Father Le Claire swam his horse in the May flood six years before. He gave no reason for the act that brought me over a road, every foot sacred to the happiest moments of my life. Past the big cottonwood, down into the West Draw where the pink blossoms called in sweet insistent tones to me to remember a day when I had crowned a little girl with blooms like these, a day when my life was in its Maytime joy. On across the prairie we swung to the very borders of Springvale, which was nestling by the river and stretching up the hillslope toward where the bluff breaks abruptly. I could see "Rockport" gray and sun-flecked beyond its sheltering line of green bushes.

Just as we turned toward Cliff Street Dever said carelessly,

"Lots of changes some ways sence I took you out of here last August. Judson, he's married two months ago."

The warm sunny glorious world turned drab and cold to me with the words.

"What's the matter, Baronet? – you're whiter'n a dead man!"

"Just a little faint. Got that way in the army," I answered, which was a lie.

"Better now? As I was sayin', Judson and Lettie has been married two months now. Kinder surprised folks by jinin' up sudden; but – oh, well, it's a lot better quick than not at all sometimes."

I caught my breath. My "spell" contracted in the army was passing. And here were Cliff Street and the round turret-like corners of Judge Baronet's stone-built domicile. It was high noon, and my father had just gone into the house. I gave Dever his fare and made the hall door at a leap. My father turned at the sound and – I was in his arms. Then came Aunt Candace, older by more than ten months. Oh, the women are the ones who suffer most. I had not thought until that moment what all this winter of absence meant to Candace Baronet. I held her in my strong arms and looked down into her love-hungry eyes. Men are such stupid unfeeling brutes. I am, at least; for I had never read in this dear woman's face until that instant what must have been written there all these years, – the love that might have been given to a husband and children of her own, this lonely, childless woman had given to me.

"Aunty, I'll never leave you again," I declared, as she clung to me, and patted my cheeks and stroked my rough curly hair.

We sat down together to the midday meal, and my father's blessing was like the benediction of Heaven to my ears.

Springvale also had its measure of good breeding. My coming was the choicest news that Dever had had to give out for many a day, and the circulation was amazing in its rapid transit. I had a host of friends here where I had grown to manhood, and the first impulse was to take Cliff Street by storm. It was Cam Gentry who counselled better methods.

"Now, by hen, let's have some sense," he urged, "the boy's jest got here. He's ben through life and death, er tarnation nigh akin to it. Let's let him be with his own till to-morror. Jest ac like we'd had a grain o' raisin' anyhow, and wait our turn. Ef he shows hisself down on this 'er street we'll jest go out and turn the Neoshy runnin' north for an hour and a half while we carry him around dry shod. But now, to-day, let him come out o' hidin', and we'll give him welcome; but ef he stays up there with Candace, we'll be gentlemen fur oncet ef it does purty nigh kill some of us."

"Cam is right," Cris Mead urged. "If he comes down here he'll take his chances, but we'll hold our fire on the hill till to-morrow."

"Well, by cracky, the Baronets never miss prayer meeting, I guess. Springvale will turn out to-night some," Grandpa Mead declared.

And so while I revelled in a home-coming, thankful to be alone with my own people, the best folks on earth were waiting and dodging about, but courteously abstaining from rushing in on our sacred home rights.

In the middle of the afternoon Cam Gentry called to Dollie to come to his aid.

"Jest tie the end of this rope good and fast around this piazzer post," he said.

His wife obeyed before she noted that the other end was fastened around Cam's right ankle. To her wondering look he responded:

"Ef I don't lariat myself to something, like a old hen wanting to steal off with her chickens, I'll be up to Baronet's spite of my efforts, I'm that crazy to see Phil once more."

Through the remainder of the May afternoon he sat on the veranda, or hopped the length of his tether to the side-walk and looked longingly up toward the high street, that faced the cliff, but his purpose did not change.

Springvale showed its sense of delicacy in more ways than this. Marjie was the last to hear of my leaving when all suddenly I turned my back on the town nearly ten months before. And now, while almost every family had discussed my return – anything furnishes a little town a sensation – the Whately family had had no notice served of the momentarily interesting topic. And so it was that Marjie, innocent of the suppressed interest, went about her home, never dreaming of anything unusual in the town talk of that day.

The May evening was delicious in its balmy air and the deepening purple of its twilight haze. The spirit of the springtime, wooing in its tone of softest music, voiced a message to the sons and daughters of men. Marjie came out at sunset and slowly took her way through the sweetness of it all up to the "Rockport" of our childhood, the trysting place of our days of love's young dream. Her fair face had a womanly strength and tenderness now, and her form an added grace over the curves of girlhood. But her hair still rippled about her brow and coiled in the same soft folds of brown at the back of her head. Her cheeks had still the pink of the wild rose bloom, and the dainty neatness in dress was as of old.

She came to the rock beyond the bushes and sat down alone looking dreamily out over the Neosho Valley.

"You'll go to prayer meeting, Phil?" Aunt Candace asked at supper.

"Yes, but I believe I'll go down the street first. Save a place for me. I want to see Dr. Hemingway next to you of all Springvale." Which was my second falsehood for that day. I needed prayer meeting.

The sunset hour was more than I could withstand. All the afternoon I had been subconsciously saying that I must keep close to the realities. These were all that counted now. And yet when the evening came, all the past swept my soul and bore every resolve before it. I did not stop to ask myself any questions. I only knew that, lonely as it must be, I must go now to "Rockport" as I had done so many times in the old happy past, a past I was already beginning numbly to feel was dead and gone forever. And yet my step was firm and my head erect, as with eager tread I came to the bushes guarding our old happy playground. I only wanted to see it once more, that was all.

The limp had gone from my foot. It was intermittent in the earlier years. I was combed and groomed again for social appearing. Aunt Candace had hung about my tie and the set of my coat, and for my old army head-gear she had resurrected the jaunty cap I had worn home from Massachusetts. With my hands in my pockets, whistling softly to abstract my thoughts, I slipped through the bushes and stood once more on "Rockport."

And there was Marjie, still looking dreamily out over the valley. She had not heard my step, so far away were her thoughts. And the picture, as I stood a moment looking at her – will the world to come hold anything more fair, I wondered. It was years ago, I know, but so clearly I recall it now it could have been a dream of yesterday. Before me were the gray rock, the dark-green valley, the gleaming waters of the Neosho, the silvery mist on the farther bluff iridescent with the pink tints of sunset reflected on the eastern sky, the quiet loveliness of the May twilight, and Marjie, beautiful with a girlish winsomeness, a woman's grace, a Madonna's tenderness.

"Were you waiting for me, dearie? I am a little late, but I am here at last."

I spoke softly, and she turned quickly at the sound of my voice. A look of dazed surprise as she leaped to her feet, and then the reality dawned upon her.

"Come, sweetheart," I said. "I have been away so long, I'm hungering for your welcome."

I held out my hands to her. Her face was very white as she made one step toward me, and then the love-light filled her brown eyes, the glorious beauty of the pink blossoms swept her cheek. I put my arms around her and drew her close to me, my own little girl, whom I had loved and thought I had lost forever.

"Oh, Phil, Phil, are you here again? Are you – " she put her little hand against my hair curling rebelliously over my cap's brim. "Are you mine once more?"

"Am I, Marjie? Six feet of me has come back; but, little girl, I have never been away. I have never let you go out of my life. It was only the mechanical action that went away. Phil Baronet stayed here! Oh, I know it now – I was acting out there; I was really living here with you, my Marjie, my own."

I held her in my arms as I spoke, and we looked out at the sweet sunset prairie. The big cottonwood, shapely as ever, was outlined against the horizon, which was illumined now with all the gorgeous grandeur of the May evening. The level rays of golden light fell on us, as we stood there, baptizing us with its splendor.

"Oh, Marjie, it was worth all the suffering and danger to have such a home-coming as this!" I kissed her lips and pushed back the little ringlets from her white forehead.

"It is vouchsafed to a man sometimes to know a bit of heaven here on earth," Father Le Claire had said to me out on this rock six years before. It was a bit of heaven that came down to me in the purple twilight of that May evening, and I lifted my face to the opal skies above me with a prayer of thankfulness for the love that was mine once more. In that hour of happiness we forgot that there was ever a storm cloud to darken the blue heavens, or ever a grief or a sin to mar the joy of living. We were young, and we were together. Over the valley swept the sweet tones of the Presbyterian Church bell. Marjie's face, radiant with light, was lifted to mine.

"I must go to prayer meeting, Phil. I shall see you again – to-morrow?" She put the question hesitatingly, even longingly.

"Yes, and to-night. Let's go together. I haven't been to prayer meeting regularly. We lost out on that on the Staked Plains."

"I must run home and comb my hair," she declared; and indeed it was a little tumbled. But from the night I first saw her, a little girl in her father's moving-wagon, with her pink sun-bonnet pushed back from her blowsy curls, her hair, however rebellious, was always a picture.

"Go ahead, little girl. I will run home, too. I forgot something. I will be down right away."

Going home, I may have walked on Cliff Street, but my head was in the clouds, and all the songs that the morning-stars sing together – all the music of the spheres – was playing itself out for me in the shadowy twilight as I went along.

At the gate Aunt Candace and my father were waiting for me.

"You needn't wait," I cried. "I will be there presently."

"Oh, joined the regular army this time," my father said, smiling. "Sorry we can't keep you, Phil." But I gave no heed to him.

"Aunt Candace," I said in a low voice. "May I see you just a minute? I want to get something."

"It's in the top drawer in my room, Phil. The key is in the little tray on my dresser," Aunt Candace said quietly. She always understood me.

When I reached the Whately home, Marjie was waiting for me at the gate. I took her little hand in my own strong big one.

"Will you wear it again for me, dearie?" I asked, holding up my mother's ring before her.

"Always and always, Phil," she murmured.

Isn't it Longfellow who speaks of "the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels," blossoming "in the infinite meadows of heaven"? They were all a-bloom that May night, and dewy and sweet lay the earth beneath them. We were a little late to prayer meeting. The choir was in its place and the audience was gathered in the pews. Judge Baronet always sat near the front, and my place was between him and Aunt Candace when I wasn't in the choir. Bess Anderson was just finishing a voluntary as we two went up the aisle together. I hadn't thought of making a sensation, I thought only of Marjie. Passing around the end of the chancel rail I gently led her by the arm up the three steps to the choir place, and turning, faced all the town as I went to my seat beside my father. I was as happy as a lover can be; but I didn't know how much of all this was written on my countenance, nor did I notice the intense hush that fell on the company. I had faced the oncoming of Roman Nose and his thousand Cheyenne warriors; there was no reason why I should feel embarrassed in a prayer meeting in the Presbyterian Church at Springvale. The service was short. I remember not one word of it except the scripture lesson. That was the Twenty-third Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;He leadeth me beside the still waters.He restoreth my soul;He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me.

These words had sounded in my ears on the night before the battle on the Arickaree, and again in the little cove on the low bluff at Fort Sill, the night Jean Pahusca was taunting me through the few minutes he was allowing me to live. That Psalm belonged to the days when I was doing my part toward the price paid out for the prairie homes and safety and peace. But never anybody read for me as Dr. Hemingway read it that evening. With the close of the service came a prayer of thanksgiving for my return. Then for the first time I was self-conscious. What had I done to be so lovingly and reverently welcomed home? I bowed my head in deep humility, and the tears welled up. Oh, I could look death calmly between the eyes as I had watched it creeping toward me on the heated Plains of the Arickaree, and among the cold starved sand dunes of the Cimarron, but to be lauded as a hero here in Springvale – the tears would come. Where were Custer, and Moore, and Forsyth, and Pliley, and Stillwell, and Morton, if such as I be called a hero?

Cam Gentry didn't lead the Doxology that night, he chased it clear into the belfry and up into the very top of the steeple; and his closing burst of melody "Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," had, as Bill Mead declared afterwards, a regular "You-couldn't-have-done-it-better-Lord-if-you-had-been-there-yourself" ring to it.

Then came the benediction, fervent, holy, gentle, with Dr. Hemingway's white face (crowned now with snowy hair) lifted up toward heaven. After that I never could remember, save that there was a hush, then a clamor, that was followed pretty soon by embraces from the older men and women, pounding thumps from the younger men and handshaking with the girls. And all the while, with a proprietary sense I had found myself near Marjie, whom I kept close beside me now, her brown head just above my shoulder.

More than once in the decades since then it has been my fortune to return to Springvale and be met at the railway station and escorted home by the town band. Sometimes for political service, sometimes for civic effort, and once because by physical strength and great daring and quick cool courage I saved three human lives in a terrible wreck; but never any ovation was like that prayer meeting in the Presbyterian Church nearly forty years ago.

The days that followed my home-coming were busy ones, for my place in the office had been vacant. Clayton Anderson had devoted himself to the Whately affairs, although nobody but those in the secret knew when Judson gave up proprietorship and went on a clerk's pay again where he belonged. Springvale was kind to Judson, as it has always been to the man who tries honestly to make good in this life's struggle. It is in the Kansas air, this broader charity, this estimation of character, redeemed or redeemable.

My father did not tell me of his part in the Whately business affairs at once, and I did not understand when, one evening, some time later, Aunt Candace said at the supper table:

"Dollie Gentry tells me Dr. John (so we called John Anderson now), reports a twelve-pound boy over at Judsons'. They are going to christen him 'John Baronet Judson.' Aren't you proud of the name, John?"

"I am of the Judson part," my father answered, with that compression of the lips that sometimes kept back a smile, and sometimes marked a growing sternness.

I met O'mie at Topeka and brought him to Springvale. It was not until in May of the next year that he went away from us and came not back any more, save in loving remembrance.

In August Tillhurst went East. Somehow I was not at all surprised when the Rockport, Massachusetts, weekly newspaper, that had come to our house every Tuesday while we had lived on Cliff Street, contained the notice of the marriage of Richard Tillhurst and Rachel Agnes Melrose. The happy couple, the paper said, would reside in Rockport.

"They may reside at the bottom of the sea for all that I care," I said thoughtlessly, not understanding then the shadow that fell for the moment on my aunt's serene face.

Long afterwards when she slept beside my father in the quiet Springvale cemetery on the bluff beyond Fingal's Creek, I found among her letters the romance of her life. I knew then for the first time that Rachel's uncle, the Ferdinand Melrose whose life was lost at sea, was the one for whom this brave kind woman had mourned. Loving as the Baronets do, even unto death, she had gone down the lonely years, forgetting herself in the broad, beautiful, unselfish life she gave to those about her.

It was late in the August of the following year, when the Kansas prairies were brownest and the summer heat the fiercest, that I was met at the courthouse door one afternoon by a lithe, coppery Osage Indian boy, who handed me a bundle, saying, "From Hard Rope, for John Baronet's son."

"Well, all right, sonny; only it's about time for the gentleman in there to be known as Philip Baronet's father. He never fought the Cheyennes. He's just the father of the man who did. What's the tariff due on this junk?"

The Osage did not smile, but he answered mildly enough, "What you will pay."

I was not cross with the world. I could afford to be generous, even at the risk of having the whole Osage tribe trailing at my heels, and begging for tobacco and food and trinkets. I loaded that young buck to the guards with the things an Indian prizes, and sent him away.

Then in my own office I undid the bundle. It was the old scarlet blanket with the white circular centre, the pattern Jean Pahusca always wore. This one was dirty and frayed and splotched. I turned from it with loathing. In the folds of the cloth a sealed letter was securely fastened. Some soldier had written it for Hard Rope, and the penmanship and language were more than average fine. But the story it told I could not exult over, although a sense of lifted pressure in some corner of my mind came with the reading.

Briefly it recited that Jean Pahusca, Kiowa renegade, was dead. Custer's penalty for him had been to give him over to the Kiowas as their captive. When the tribe left Fort Sill in March, Satanta had had him brought bound to the Kiowa village then on the lower Washita. His crime, committed on the day of Custer's fight with Black Kettle, was the heinous one of stealing his Uncle Satanta's youngest and favorite wife, and leaving her to perish miserably in the cold of that December month in which we also had suffered. His plan had been to escape from the Kiowas and reach the Cheyennes on the Sweetwater before we did, to meet me there, and this time, to give no moment for my rescue. So Hard Rope's message ran. But this was not all. The punishment that fell on Jean Pahusca was in proportion to his crime, as an Indian counts justice. He was sold as a slave to the Apaches and carried captive to the mountains of Old Mexico. Nor was he ever liberated again. Up above the snow line, with the passes guarded (for Jean was as dangerous to his mother's race as to his father's), he had fretted away his days, dying at last of cold and cruel neglect among the dreary rocks of the icy peaks. This much information Hard Rope's letter brought. I burned both the letter and the blanket, telling no one of them except my father.

"This Hard Rope was for some reason very friendly to me on your account," I said. "He told me on the Washita the night before we left Camp Inman that he had shadowed Jean all the time he was at Fort Sill, and had more than once prevented the half-breed from making an attack on me. He promised to let me know what became of Pahusca if he ever found out. He has kept his word."

"I know Hard Rope," my father said. "I saved his life one annuity day long ago. Tell Mapleson had made Jean Pahusca drunk. You know what kind of a beast he was then. And Tell had run this Osage into Jean's path, where he would be sure to lose his life, and Tell would have the big pile of money Hard Rope carried. That's the kind of beast Tell was. An Indian has his own sense of obligation; and then it is a good asset to be humane all along the line anyhow, although I never dreamed I was saving the man who was to save my boy."

"Shall we tell Le Claire?" I asked.

"Only that both Jean and his father are dead. We'll spare him the rest. Le Claire has gone to St. Louis to a monastery. He will never be strong again. But he is one of the kings of the earth; he has given the best years of his manhood to build up a kingdom of peace between the white man and the savage. No record except the Great Book of human deeds will ever be able to show how much we owe to men like Le Claire whose influence has helped to make a loyal peaceful tribe like the Osages. The brutal fiendishness of the Plains Indians is the heritage of Spanish cruelty toward the ancestors of the Apache and Kiowa and Arapahoe and Comanche, and you can see why they differ from our tribes here in Eastern Kansas. Le Claire has done his part toward the purchase of the Plains, and I am glad for the quiet years before him."

It was the custom in Springvale for every girl to go up to Topeka for the final purchases of her bridal belongings. We were to be married in October. In the late September days Mrs. Whately and her daughter spent a week at the capital city. I went up at the end of the visit to come home with them. Since the death of Irving Whately nothing had ever roused his wife to the pleasure of living like this preparation for Marjie's marriage, and Mrs. Whately, still a young and very pretty woman, bloomed into that mature comeliness that carries a grace of permanence the promise of youth may only hint at. She delighted in every detail of the coming event, and we two most concerned were willing to let anybody look after the details. We had other matters to think about.

"Come, little sweetheart," I said one night after supper at the Teft House, "your mother is to spend the evening with a friend of hers. I want to take you for a walk."

Strange how beautiful Topeka looked to me this September. It had all the making of a handsome city even then, although the year since I came up to the political rally had brought no great change except to extend the borders somewhat. Like two happy young lovers we strolled out toward the southwest, past the hole in the ground that was to contain the foundation of the new wings for the State Capitol, past Washburn College, and on to where the slender little locust tree waved its dainty lacy branches in graceful welcome.

"Marjie, I want you to see this tree. It's not the first time I have been here. Rachel – Mrs. Tillhurst – and I came here a few times." Marjie's hand nestled softly against my arm. "I always made faces at it as soon as I got away from it; but it is a beautiful little tree, and I want to put you with it in my mind. It was here last Fall that my father said he didn't believe that you were engaged to Amos Judson."

"Didn't believe," Marjie cried; "why, Phil, he knew I wasn't. I told him so when he was asked to urge me to marry Amos."

"He urge you to marry Amos! Now Marjie, girl, I hate to be hard on the gentleman; but if he did that it's my duty to scalp him, and I will go home and do it."