ived. All Benton fell in behind--clerks and bar-keeps and sheepmen
and cowboys tumbling into fours. Under the yellow flare of the kerosene
torches they went down the street like a campaigning company in rout
step, scattering din and dust.

Great, deep-chested, happy-looking, open air fellows, they were; big
lovers, big haters, good laughers, eaters, drinkers--and every one of
them potentially a fighting man.

And suddenly, as I watched them pass, something deep down in me cried
out: "Great God! What a fighting force we can drum up out of the cactus
and the sagebrush when the time comes!" And when I looked again, not one
of the sun-bronzed faces was strange to me, but every one was the face
of a brother. Choteau's Congressman was my Congressman! Benton's Great
Man was my Great Man! I fell into line alongside a big bronco-buster
with his high-heeled boots and his clanking spurs and his bandy-legged,
firm-footed horseman's stride. Thirty yards farther on we were old
comrades. That is the Western way.

Once again the little band struck up a march, which was very little more
than a rhythmic snarling and booming of the drums, with now and then the
shrill savage cry of the clarinet stabbing the general dim. Irresistibly
the whole line swung into step.

What is it about the rhythmic stride of many men down a dusty road that
grips you by the throat and makes your lungs feel like overcharged
balloons? I felt something like the maddening, irritating tang of
powder-smoke in my throat. Trumpet cries that I had never heard, yet
somehow dimly remembered, wakened in the night about us--far and faint,
but haughty with command. It took very little imagination for me to
feel the whirlwind of battles I may never know, to hear the harsh
metallic snarl of high-power bullets I may never face. For, marching
there in the dusty, torch-painted night, with that ragged procession of
Westerners, a deep sense of the essential comradeship of free men had
come upon me; and I could think of these men in no other way than as
potential fighting men--the stern hard stuff with which you build and
keep your empires. What a row Napoleon could have kicked up with half a
million of these sagebrush boys to fling foeward under his
cannon-clouds!

We reached the cottage of the Great Man with the fresh laurels. He met
us at the gate. He called us Jim and Bill and Frank and Kid something or
other. We called him Charlie. And he wasn't the least bit stiff or
pro