"I will send a telegram out at once that I am safe, and all danger over. He will not want me to leave now."
"Very well. A messenger will start at once with all our letters and messages. Anything you wish to send can go at the same time."
"What news have you?"
"I only had time to glance at my mail, but the papers are all that Lawson has predicted. If you would know how important a criminal I am, read these"—he pointed at a bundle on a chair. "I must go back to the office now, but I will wait for your letters and telegrams before despatching a messenger. If you think it better to go than to stay, I will ask Captain Maynard to escort you to the station."
"I will stay," she replied.
She wrote a brief telegram to her father, saying: "I am quite safe and hard at work. All quiet; don't worry," and also composed a letter giving vital details of the situation and taking strong ground against the way in which the cattlemen had invaded the reservation. In conclusion she added: "I have a fine studio, plenty of models, and am in fine health; I cannot think of giving up my work because of this foolish panic. Don't let these settlers influence you against Captain Curtis; he's right this time."
As she ran through the papers and caught the full significance of their precipitate attack on the agent, her teeth clinched in hot indignation. At the first breath, before they were sure of a single item of news, they leaped upon an honorable man, accusing him of concealing stolen cattle and of harboring murderers and thieves. "As for the Indians, it is time to exterminate these vermin! Let the State wipe out this tribe and its agency, and send this fellow Curtis back to his regiment where he belongs," was the burden of their song.
As she read on, tingling with wrath at these vulgarly written and utterly un-Christian editorials, the girl caught an amazing side-glimpse of herself and the views she once held. She remembered reading just such reports once before, and joining with her father in his desire to punish the redmen. Was Lawson right? Had her notions of the "brave and noble pioneers fighting the wild beast and the savage" arisen from ignorance of their true nature? Had they always been as narrow, as bigoted, as relentless, and as greedy as these articles hinted at? Some of Lawson's clean-cut, relentless phrases came back to her at the moment, and she began to believe that he was nearer right than she had been. And her father? Would he sanction such libels as these? At last the essential grandeur of the position held in common by both Curtis and Lawson—of the right of the small people to their place on the planet—came to her, and in opposition to their grave, sweet eyes she saw again the brutal, leering faces of the mob, and comprehended the feelings of a chief like Grayman, as he confronts the oncoming hordes of a destroying race.
Meanwhile, in the grassy hollow between two round-top hills the bands of Elk and Grayman were gathered in extraordinary council. No one was in gala-dress, no one was painted, all were serious or sad or morose. Upon their folded blankets the head men sat in a small circle on the smooth sod, exposed to the blazing sun. Behind them stood or knelt a larger circle, the men and boys on one side, the women on the other, while in the rear, mounted on their fleetest ponies, some two hundred of the young men were ranked, enthralled listeners to the impassioned speeches of the old men.