ing dragged through them into a
perdition no pen can picture. And so they rode away toward the sunset.

On and on they went through days and days of unutterable blackness, of
suffering and despair. On, until direction and space were lost to
measure. For her a new, pitiless, far-off heaven looked down on a new
agonized earth. The days ran into months, and no day had in it a ray of
hope, a line of anything but misery.

And again beyond the Saline, where the little streams turn toward the
Republican River, in another household the same tragedy of the times was
being played, with all its settings of terror and suffering. Here the
grown-up daughter of the home, a girl of eighteen years, was wrenched
from arms that clung to her, and, bound on a pony's back, was hurried
three hundred miles away into an unknown land. For her began the life of
a slave. She was the victim of brute lust, the object of the vengeful
jealousy of the squaws. The starved, half-naked, wretched girl, whose
eighteen years had been protected in the shelter of a happy Christian
home, was now the captive laborer whose tasks strong men would stagger
under. God's providence seemed far away in those days of the winning of
the prairie.

Fate, by and by, threw these two women together. Their one ray of
comfort was the sight of one another. And for both the days dragged
heavily by, the two women of my boyhood's dreams. Women of whose fate I
knew nothing as we sat by the south side of old Fort Hays that afternoon
forty years ago.

"Did you know, boys, that General Sheridan is not going to let those
tribes settle down to a quiet winter as they've been allowed to do every
year since they were put on their reservations?" I asked O'mie and Bud.
"I've been here long enough to find out that these men out here won't
stand for it any longer," I went on. "They're MEN on these Plains, who
are doing this homesteading up and down these river valleys, and you
write every letter of the word with a capital."

"What'th going to be done?" Bud queried.

"Sheridan's going to carry a campaign down into their own country and
lick these tribes into behaving themselves right now, before another
Summer and another outbreak like that one two months ago."

"What's these Kansas men with their capital letters got to do with it?"
put in O'mie.

"Governor Crawford has issued a call at Sheridan's command, for a Kansas
regiment to go into service for six months, and help to do this thing