ching trust in me.

The Palace Hotel, with its doorway brightly lighted with electricity,
proved a pleasant surprise. It looked clean and bright and new, and the
proprietor, a cheerful and self-respecting citizen, was equally
reassuring. We went to our rooms with restored confidence in Oklahoma.

The next morning, before we had finished our breakfast, a messenger from
the Agency came in to say that a carryall was at the door, and soon we
were on our way toward the Fort.

The roads were muddy, but the plain was vividly, brilliantly green, and
the sky radiantly blue. The wind, filled with delicious spring odors,
came out of the west; larks were whistling and wild ducks were in
flight. To my wife it was as strange as it was beautiful. It was the
prairie at its best--like the Jim River in 1881.

Fort Reno (a cluster of frame barracks), occupied a low hill which
overlooked the valley of the Canadian, on whose green meadows piebald
cattle were scattered like bits of topaz. Flowers starred the southern
slopes, and beside the stream near the willows (in which mocking birds
were singing), stood clusters of the conical tents of the Cheyennes,
lodges of canvas made in the ancient form. Our way led to the Agency
through one of these villages, and as we passed we saw women at their
work, and children in their play, all happy and quite indifferent to the
white man and his comment.

The Stouchs met us at the door of the big frame cottage which was the
agent's house, and while Mrs. Stouch took charge of Zulime the Major led
me at once to his office, in order that I might lose no time in getting
acquainted with his wards. In ten minutes I found myself deep in another
world, a world of captive, aboriginal warriors, sorrowfully concerned
with the problem of "walking the white man's trail."

All that day and each day thereafter, files of white-topped wagons
forded the river, keeping their westward march quite in the traditional
American fashion, to disappear like weary beetles over the long, low
ridge past the fort which stood like a guidon to the promised land. Here
were all the elements of Western settlement, the Indians, the soldiers,
the glorious sweeping wind and the flowering sod, and in addition to all
these the resolute white men seeking their fortunes beneath the sunset
sky, just as of old, remorselessly carrying their women and children
into hardship and solitude. Without effort I was able to imagine myself
back in the day