y
replied with an air of candor.

As they approached the Custer fight, however, they paused, pondered,
checked up one another's statements, and at last produced what I
believed to be the truth regarding the share in that battle--and the
truth is incredible. They recreated the whole scene for me as Two Moons
had done. They corroborated all that I had obtained from the northern
Cheyennes.

I forgot the plow and the reaper while sitting there in conference with
those men for they were thinkers as well as warriors. Within the walls
of that lodge they were not despised outcasts, they were leaders,
councillors, men of weight. They had reentered a world which caused
their faces to shine just as my father's face shone when he told of
Grant at Vicksburg or recounted the days of his youth on The Old
Wisconse. For a little while I inhabited their world, and when I left
them I carried with me a deepened sense of their essential manliness.

Alas! Zulime was less enthusiastic. The flies, the heat, the dust, the
bad food--so commonplace to me--were horrifying to her, and so for her
sake I cut short my historical studies and hurried her back to the Fort,
back to the wholesome fare of the officers' mess. With no consuming
literary interest to sustain her she found even the Agency a weariness;
and as the date for meeting my father was near, we took the stage back
to Bismark, she with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of regret that
I had not been able to push my investigations deeper. There was a big
theme here, but I had small faith in my ability to handle it. It
required an epic poet, rather than a realistic novelist.

Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark
the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the
Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We
ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly
extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here
and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which
you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight."

"All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the
expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has
witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine,
and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert'
eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your
mother cou