until it was too late to protect her. I read the entries over and over.
When day broke it seemed to me the morning after my own death, such
knowing and experiencing had passed through me. I could not see her
again until I had command of myself.

So I dressed and went silently down stairs. The Pawnees were stirring
in the kitchen. I got some bread and meat from them, and also some grain
for the horse; then mounted and rode to the river.

The ferryman lived near the old stockade. Some time always passed after
he saw the signals before the deliberate Frenchman responded. I led my
horse upon the unwieldly craft propelled by two huge oars, which the
ferryman managed, running from one to another according to the swing of
the current. It was broad day when we reached the other shore; one of
those days, gray overhead, when moisture breaks upward through the
ground, instead of descending. Many light clouds flitted under the
grayness. The grass showed with a kind of green blush through its old
brown fleece.

I saw the first sailing vessel of spring coming to anchor, from the
straits of the great lakes. Once I would have hailed that vessel as
possible bearer of news. Now it could bring me nothing of any
importance.

The trail along the Fox river led over rolling land, dipping into coves
and rising over hills. The Fox, steel blue in the shade, becomes tawny
as its namesake when its fur of rough waves is combed to redness in the
sunlight. Under grayness, with a soft wind blowing, the Fox showed his
blue coat.

The prospect was so large, with a ridge running along in the distance,
and open country spreading away on the other side, that I often turned
in my saddle and looked back over the half-wooded trail. I thought I saw
a figure walking a long way behind me, and being alone, tried to
discern what it was. But under that gray sky nothing was sharply
defined. I rode on thinking of the book in the breast of my coat.

It was certain I was not to marry. And being without breakfast and
unstimulated by the sky, I began to think also what unstable material I
had taken in hand when I undertook to work with Indians. Instinctively I
knew then what a young southern statesman named Jefferson Davis whom I
first met as a commandant of the fort at Green Bay--afterwards told me
in Washington: "No commonwealth in a republic will stand with interests
apart from the federated whole." White men, who have exclaimed from the
beginning against the