Sometimes, in faint half-heard tones from far away, we may imagine echoes from another world than ours, and, as we enter into the final gloom, these harmonies may become divine. In the darker recesses of our intellectual life we find shadows that never move. They seem to lie like black sinister bars across our mental paths. We know not what is beyond them, and we shrink from a nameless terror. Into these shadows our loved ones have gone. They have returned into the Elemental Mystery. Their voices have not come back to us, but their cadences may be in the singing winds and amid the patter of the summer rain.
Our Ship of Dreams can bear a wondrous cargo. We can sometimes see its mirage in the still skies beyond the winding rivers, though its sails and spars are far below the horizon’s rim. We know that on it are those who beckon, and its wave-kissed prow is toward us. Frail though its timbers be, the years may bring it, but if it never comes, we have seen the picture, and new banners have been unfurled before it.
HE “WAITED UNTIL HE SAW HIS STAR COME OVER THE
HORIZON IN THE PATH OF THE YOUNG MOON”
CHAPTER XIV
THE RED ARROW
WHILE merciless masters have driven the red man from the dune country, indelible impressions of his race remain. His nomenclature is on the maps, and the lakes, rivers, and streams carry names that were precious to his people. His mythology still envelops the region with a halo of romance and fable.
The dust of his forefathers has mingled with the hills, and time has obliterated nearly every material trace of him, except those among the imperishable stones. The débris of the little quarries is still visible on small promontories, and in the depressions along the ridges, where the pines have held the soil against the action of the wind and rain. Here we find innumerable chips and fragments of broken stones, left by the workers, who fashioned the implements of war and peace on these sequestered spots.
Occasionally an imperfect or unfinished arrow or spear-head appears among the refuse, which the patient artificer discarded. Many perfect specimens are found, but these are seldom discovered near the sites of the rude workshops. They are uncovered by the shifting sands in the “blow outs,” where the winds eddy on the sides of hills that may have held their secrets for centuries, and turned up out of the fertile soil in the back country, by the plowshares of a race that carried the bitter cup of affliction to the aborigine.
The little flakes of flint may be scattered over a space forty or fifty feet across, and many thousands of perfect points may have gone forth from it, as messages of death to the hearts of enemies, or to pierce the quivering flesh of the innocent.