have shipwrake, ye
thunder, ye lightening bournes & kills us, & all comes from above, & you
say that itt is goode to be there. For my part, I will nott go there.
Contrary they say that ye reprobates & guilty goeth downe & bourne.
They are mistaken; all is goode heare. Do nott you see that itt is ye
Earthe that nourishes all living creatures--ye waiter, ye fishes, & ye
yus, and that corne & all other fruits come up, & that all things are
nott soe contrary to us as that from above? Ye devils live in ye air &
they took my son. When you see that ye Earthe is our Mother, then you
will see that all things on itt are goode. Ye Earthe was made for ye
Panugaga, & ye souls of our warriors help us against our Ennemy. Ye
ffrench dogg is Mahongui's spirit. He tells us to goe to warre against
ye ffrench. Would a ffrench dogg doe that? You are nott yett Panugaga to
follow your father in warre."

THE ESSENTIALS AT FORT ADOBE

THE Indian suns himself before the door of his tepee, dreaming of the
past. For a long time now he has eaten of the white man's lotos--the
bimonthly beef-issue. I looked on him and wondered at the new things.
The buffalo, the warpath, all are gone. What of the cavalrymen over at
Adobe--his Nemesis in the stirring days--are they, too, lounging in
barracks, since his lordship no longer leads them trooping over the
burning flats by day and through the ragged hills by night? I will go
and see.

The blistered faces of men, the gaunt horses dragging stiffly along to
the cruel spurring, the dirty lack-lustre of campaigning--that, of
course, is no more. Will it be parades, and those soul-deadening "fours
right" and "column left" affairs? Oh, my dear, let us hope not.

Nothing is so necessary in the manufacture of soldiers, sure enough, but
it is not hard to learn, and once a soldier knows it I can never
understand why it should be drilled into him until it hurts. Besides,
from another point of view, soldiers in rows and in lines do not compose
well in pictures. I always feel, after seeing infantry drill in an
armory, like Kipling's light-house keeper, who went insane looking at
the cracks between the boards--they were all so horribly alike.

Then Adobe is away out West in the blistering dust, with no towns of any
importance near it. I can understand why men might become listless when
they are at field-work, with the full knowledge that nothing but their
brothers are looking at them save the hawks and coyotes