last night was too much for Mis'
Judson. She fainted away, an' when she come to, the baby was dead. I'm
cookin' a good meal for all of 'em. Land knows, carin' for the little
corpse is all they can do without botherin' to cook."

Good Mrs. Gentry used her one talent for everybody's comfort. And as for
the Judsons, theirs was one of the wayside tragedies that keep ever
alongside the line of civil strife.

They made room for us on the veranda, six husky Kansas bred fellows,
hardly more than half-way through our teens, and we fell in with the
group about Father Le Claire. He gave us a searching glance, and his
face clouded. Good Dr. Hemingway beside him was eager for his story.

"Tell us the whole thing," he urged. "Then we can understand our part in
it. Surely the arm of the Lord was not shortened for us last night."

"It is a strange story, Dr. Hemingway, with a strange and tragic
ending," replied the priest. He related then the plot which O'mie had
heard set forth by the strangers in our town. "I left at once to warn
the Osages, believing I could return before last night."

"Them Osages is a cussed ornery lot, if that Jean out on the edge of
the crowd there is a sample," a man from the west side of town broke in.

"They are true blue, and Jean is not an Osage; he's a Kiowa," Le Claire
replied quietly.

"What of him ain't French," declared Cam Gentry. "That's where his
durned meanness comes in biggest. Not but what a Kiowa's rotten enough.
But sence he didn't seem to take part in this doings last night, I guess
we can stand him a little while longer."

Father Le Claire's face flushed. Then a pallor overspread the flame.
His likeness to the Indian flashed up with that flush. So had I seen
Pahusca flush with anger, and a paleness cover his coppery countenance.
Self-mastery was a part of the good man's religion, however, and in a
voice calm but full of sympathy he told us of the tragic events whose
evil promise had overshadowed our town with an awful peril.

It was a well-planned, cold-blooded horror, this scheme of the Southern
Confederacy, to unite the fierce tribes of the Southwest against the
unprotected Union frontier. And with the border raiders on the one side
and the hostile Indians on the other, small chance of life would have
been left to any Union man, woman, or child in all this wide, beautiful
Kansas. In the four years of the Civil War no cruelty could have
exceeded the consequences of this conspiracy.