effort, the "good Indian" came forth from his reservation. Like the
rattlesnake from its crevice, he uncoiled in the warm sunshine, grew
and flourished on what lay in his pathway, and full of deadly venom he
made a trail of terror and death.

This sort of thing went on year after year until, in the late Summer of
1868, the crimes of the savages culminated in those terrible raids
through western Kansas, whose full particulars even the official war
records deem unfit to print.

Such were the times the three of us from Springvale were discussing on
the south side of the walls of old Fort Hays in the warm sunshine of an
October afternoon.

We were new to the Plains and we did not dream of the tragedies that
were taking place not many miles away from the shadow of the Fort on
that October afternoon, tragedies whose crimes we three would soon be
called forth to help to avenge. For even as we lounged idly there in the
soft sunshine, and looked away through shimmering seas of autumn haze
toward the still land where Bud was to find his quiet grave at the end
of the trail--as we talked of the frontier and its needs, up in the
Saline Valley, a band of Indians was creeping stealthily upon a
cornfield where a young man was gathering corn. In his little home just
out of sight was a pretty, golden-haired girl, the young settler's bride
of a few months. Through the window she caught sight of her husband's
horse racing wildly toward the house. She did not know that her husband,
wounded and helpless, lay by the river bank, pierced by Indian arrows.
Only one thought was hers, the thought that her husband had been
hurt--maybe killed--in a runaway. What else could this terrified horse
with its flying harness ends mean? She rushed from the house and started
toward the field.

A shout of fiendish glee fell on her ears. She was surrounded by painted
savage men, human devils, who caught her by the arms, dragged her about
by her long silky, golden hair, beat her brutally in her struggles to
free herself, bound her at last, and thrusting her on a pony, rode as
only Indians ride, away toward the sunset. And their captive, the sweet
girl-wife of gentle birth and gentle rearing, the happy-hearted young
home-maker on the prairie frontier, singing about her work an hour
before, dreaming of the long, bright years with her loved one--God pity
her! For her the gates of a living Hell had swung wide open, and she,
helpless and horror-stricken, was be