try to be any more miserable by being bored with
somebody I don't care for at Topeka. But don't forget the letter.
Good-night, little sweetheart," and after the fashion of lovers, I said
good-bye.

Kansas is essentially a land of young politicians. When O'mie took his
band to the capital city to play martial music for the big political
rally, there were more young men than gray beards on the speakers' stand
and on the front seats. I had gone with the Springvale crowd on this
jaunt, but I did not consider myself a person of importance.

"There's Judge Baronet's son; he's just out of Harvard. He's got big
influence with the party down his way. His father always runs away ahead
of his ticket and has the whole district about as he wants it. That's
the boy that saved Springvale one night when the pro-slavery crowd was
goin' to burn it, the year of the Quantrill raid."

So, I heard myself exploited in the hotel lobby of the old Teft House.

"What's Tell Mapleson after this year, d'ye reckon? Come in a week ago.
He's the doggondest feller to be after somethin', an' gets it, too,
somehow." The speaker was a seasoned politician of the hotel lobby
variety.

"Oh, he's got a big suit of some kind back East. It's a case of money
bein' left to heirs, and he's looking out that the heirs don't get it."

"Ain't it awful about the Saline country?" a bystander broke in here.
"Just awful! Saw a man from out there last night by the name of Morton.
He said that them Cheyennes are raidin' an' murderin' all that can't get
into the towns. Lord pity the unprotected settlers way out in that
lonely country. This man said they just killed the little children
before their mothers' eyes, after they'd scalped and tomahawked the
fathers. Just beat them to death, and then carried off the women. Oh,
God! but it's awful."

Awful! I lived through the hours of that night from the time young Tell
Mapleson had told of Jean Pahusca's plan to seize Marjie, to the moment
when I saw her safe in the shelter of her mother's doorway. Awful! And
this sort of thing was going on now in the Saline Valley. How could God
permit it?

"There was one family out there, they got the mother and baby and just
butchered the other children right before her eyes. They hung the baby
to a tree later, and when they got ready they killed its mother. It was
the only merciful thing they done, I guess, in all their raid, for they
made her die a thousand deaths before they really