cut off her poor
pitiful life."

So I heard the talk running on, and I wondered at the bluff committeeman
who broke up the group to get the men in line for a factional caucus.

Did the election of a party favorite, the nomination of a man whose turn
had come, or who would be favorable to "our crowd" in his appointments
match in importance this terrible menace to life on our Indian frontier?
I had heard much of the Saline and the Solomon River valleys. Union
soldiers were homesteading those open plains. My father's
comrades-in-arms they had been, and he was intensely interested in their
welfare. These Union men had wounds still unhealed from service in the
Civil War. And the nation they bore these wounds to save, the Government
at Washington, was ignorant or indifferent to this danger that
threatened them hourly--a danger infinitely worse than death to women.
And the State in the vital throes of a biennial election was treating
the whole affair as a deplorable incident truly, but one the national
government must look out for.

I was young and enthusiastic, but utterly without political ambition. I
was only recently out of college, with a scholar's ideals of civic duty.
And with all these, I had behind me the years of a frontier life on the
border, in which years my experience and inspiration had taught me the
value of the American home, and a strong man's duty toward the weak and
defenceless. The memories of my mother, the association and training of
my father's sister, and my love for Marjie made all women sacred to me.
And while these feelings that stirred the finest fibres of my being, and
of which I never spoke then, may have been the mark of a less practical
nature than most young men have to-day, I account my life stronger,
cleaner and purer for having had them.

I could take only a perfunctory interest in the political game about me,
and I felt little elation at the courteous request that I should take a
seat in the speakers' stand, when the clans did finally gather for a
grand struggle for place.

The meeting opened with O'mie's band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner."
It brought the big audience to their feet, and the men on the platform
stood up. I was the tallest one among them. Also I was least nervous,
least anxious, and least important to that occasion. Perfunctorily, too,
I listened to the speeches, hearing the grand old Republican party's
virtues lauded, and the especial fitness of certain of its col