mounted to service. He waited about to meet and help his
love, he hastened to defend her and to guide her; and if the favored one
knew her role she humored his fancies, permitting him to aid her in
finding her way across a weedy pasture lot or over a tiny little brook
which he was pleased to call a torrent. A smile of derision was fatal.
He would not submit to ridicule or joking. At the first jocular word his
hands clinched and his eyes flamed with anger. His was not a face of
laughter; for the most part it was serious in expression, and his eyes
were rapt with dreams of great deeds.

He had one mate to whom he talked freely, and him he chose often to be
his companion in the woods or on the prairies. This was John Burns, son
of a farmer who lived near the town. Harry spent nearly every Saturday
and Sunday during the summer months on the Burns farm. He helped Jack
during haying and harvest, and when their tasks were done the two boys
wandered away to the bank of the river and there, under some great
basswood tree on delicious sward, they lay and talked of wild animals
and Indians and the West. At this time the great chieftains of the
Sioux, Sitting Bull and Gall, were becoming famous to the world, and the
first reports of the findings of gold in the Black Hills were being
made. A commission appointed by President Grant had made a treaty with
the Sioux wherein Sitting Bull was told, "If you go to this new
reservation and leave Dakota to the settlers, you shall be unmolested so
long as grass grows and water runs."

But the very guard sent in to protect this commission reported "gold in
the grass roots," and the insatiate greed of the white man broke all
bounds--the treaty was ignored, and Sitting Bull, the last chieftain of
the Sioux, calling his people together, withdrew deeper into the
wilderness of Wyoming. The soldiers were sent on the trail, and the
press teemed for months with news of battles and speeches and campaigns.

All these exciting events Harry and his friend Jack read and discussed
hotly. Jack was eager to own a mine. "I'd like to pick up a nugget," he
said, but Harold was not interested. "I don't care to mine; I'd like to
be with General Custer. I'd like to be one of the scouts. I'd like to
have a coat like that." He pointed at one of the pictures wherein two or
three men in fringed buckskin shirts and wide hats were galloping across
a rocky plain.

Many times as the two boys met to talk over these allur