At the close of the Civil War the unhappy Indians long continued in a
state of smoldering animosity, or warlike activity, tribe against
tribe, band against band; they had inherited the rancor and bitterness
of the White Man's war with neither the fruits of victory nor the
dignity that attends honorable defeat. The reservations that belonged
originally to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek
tribes, were reduced in area to make room for new tribes from Kansas,
Colorado and other states, and the Indian wars resulted. For a time
the scalp-knife was crimsoned, the stake was charred, bands stole in
single file over mountains and among half-dried streams; troups of the
regular army were assaulted by invisible foes, and forts were
threatened. Youths who read romances of a hundred years ago dealing
with the sudden war-cry, the flaming cabin, the stealthy approach of
swarming savages, need have traveled only a few hundred miles to
witness on the open page of life what seemed to them, in their
long-settled states, fables of a dead past.

But though the Indian wars in the Territory had been bloody and
vindictive, they had not been protracted as in the old days. Around
the country of the red man was drawn closer and more securely, day by
day, the girdle of civilization. Within its constricting grasp the
spirit of savagery, if not crushed, was at least subdued. Tribes naked
but for their blankets, unadorned save by the tattoo, found themselves
pressed close to other tribes which, already civilized, had
relinquished the chase for agricultural pursuits. Primeval men,
breathing this quickened atmosphere of modernity, either grew more
sophisticated, or perished like wild flowers brought too near the heat.
It is true the plains were still unoccupied, but they had been
captured--for the railroad had come, and the buffalo had vanished.

Brick Willock and the man he had come to see were very good types of
the first settlers of the new country--one a highwayman, hiding from
his kind, the other a trapper by occupation, trying to keep ahead of
the pursuing waves of immigration. It was the first time Lahoma had
seen Bill Atkins, and as she caught sight of him before his dugout, her
eyes brightened with interest. He was a tall lank man of about
sixty-five, with a huge gray mustache and bushy hair of iron-gray, but
without a beard. The mustache gave him an effect of exceeding
fierceness, and the deeply wrinkled forehead a