us feat as well. I watched those above draw up O'mie's body and I
was the last to leave the cave. As I turned to go, by merest chance, my
eye caught sight of a knife handle protruding from a crevice in the
rock. I picked it up. It was the short knife Jean Pahusca always wore at
his belt. As I looked closely, I saw cut in script letters across the
steel blade the name, _Jean Le Claire_.

I put the thing in my pocket and soon overtook the other boys, who were
leaping and clinging on their way to the crest.

That night Kansas was swept across by the very worst storm I have known
in all these sixty years. It lifted above the town and spared the
beautiful oak grove in the bottom lands beside us. Further down it swept
the valley clean, and the bluff about the cave had not one shrub on its
rough sides. The lightning, too, played strange pranks. The thunderbolts
shattered trees and rocks, up-rooting the one and rending and tumbling
the other in huge masses of debris upon the valley. It broke even the
rough way we had traversed to the Hermit's Cave, and a great heap of
fallen stone now shut the cavern in like a rock tomb. Where O'mie had
lain was sealed to the world, and it was a full quarter of a century
before a path was made along that dangerous cliff-side again.

CHAPTER X

O'MIE'S CHOICE

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?

--MACAULAY.

There was only one church bell in Springvale for many years. It called
to prayers, or other public service. It sounded the alarm of fire, and
tolled for the dead. It was our school-bell and wedding-bell. It clanged
in terror when the Cheyennes raided eastward in '67, and it pealed out
solemnly for the death of Abraham Lincoln. It chimed on Christmas Eve
and rang in each New Year. Its two sad notes that were tolled for the
years of the little Judson baby had hardly ceased their vibrations when
it broke forth into a ringing, joyous resonance for the finding of O'mie
alive.

O'mie was taken to our home. No other woman's hands were so strong and
gentle as the hands of Candace Baronet. Everybody felt that O'mie could
be trusted nowhere else. It was hard for Cam and Dollie at first, but
when Dollie found she might cook every meal and send it up to my aunt,
she was more reconciled; while Cam came and went, doing a multitude of
kindly acts. This was long before the days of telephones, and a hundre