. Let's burn him out av
there oursilves. Then we can adorn our own tepee wid that soft black La
Salle-Marquette-Hennepin French scalp."

I agreed, and we went our way burdened by a secret dangerous but
fascinating to boys like ourselves.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE PRAIRIE TWILIGHT

The spacious prairie is helper to a spacious life.
Big thoughts are nurtured here, with little friction.

--QUAYLE.

By the time I was fifteen I was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as
my father. Boy-like, I was prodigal of my bounding vigor, which had not
tempered down to the strength of my mature manhood. It was well for me
that a sobering responsibility fell on me early, else I might have
squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy
story-teller whose sixty years sit lightly on him, there would have been
only a ripple in the sod of the curly mesquite on the Plains and a
little heap of dead dust, turned to the inert earth again. The West
grows large men, as it grows strong, beautiful women; and I know that
the boys and girls then differed only in surroundings and opportunity
from the boys and girls of Springvale to-day. Life is finer in its
appointments now; but I doubt if it is any more free or happy than it
was in those days when we went to oyster suppers and school exhibitions
up in the Red Range neighborhood. Among us there was the closest
companionship, as there needs must be in a lonely and spacious land.
What can these lads and lasses of to-day know of a youth nurtured in the
atmosphere of peril and uncertainty such as every one of us knew in
those years of border strife and civil war? Sometimes up here, when I
see the gay automobile parties spinning out upon the paved street and
over that broad highway miles and miles to the west, I remember the time
when we rode our Indian ponies thither, and the whole prairie was our
boulevard.

Marjie could ride without bridle or saddle, and she sat a horse like a
cattle queen. The four Anderson children were wholesome and
good-natured, as they were good scholars, and they were good riders.
They were all tow-headed and they all lisped, and Bud was the most
hopeless case among them. Flaxen-haired, baby-faced youngster that he
was, he was the very first in all our crowd to learn to drop on the side
of his pony and ride like a Comanche. O'mie and I also succeeded in
learning that trick; Tell Mapleson broke a collar-bone, attempting it;
and Jim Conlow, as O'mi