"There's Judge Baronet's son; he's just out of Harvard. He's got big influence with the party down his way. His father always runs away ahead of his ticket and has the whole district about as he wants it. That's the boy that saved Springvale one night when the pro-slavery crowd was goin' to burn it, the year of the Quantrill raid."

So, I heard myself exploited in the hotel lobby of the old Teft House.

"What's Tell Mapleson after this year, d'ye reckon? Come in a week ago. He's the doggondest feller to be after somethin', an' gets it, too, somehow." The speaker was a seasoned politician of the hotel lobby variety.

"Oh, he's got a big suit of some kind back East. It's a case of money bein' left to heirs, and he's looking out that the heirs don't get it."

"Ain't it awful about the Saline country?" a bystander broke in here. "Just awful! Saw a man from out there last night by the name of Morton. He said that them Cheyennes are raidin' an' murderin' all that can't get into the towns. Lord pity the unprotected settlers way out in that lonely country. This man said they just killed the little children before their mothers' eyes, after they'd scalped and tomahawked the fathers. Just beat them to death, and then carried off the women. Oh, God! but it's awful."

Awful! I lived through the hours of that night from the time young Tell Mapleson had told of Jean Pahusca's plan to seize Marjie, to the moment when I saw her safe in the shelter of her mother's doorway. Awful! And this sort of thing was going on now in the Saline Valley. How could God permit it?

"There was one family out there, they got the mother and baby and just butchered the other children right before her eyes. They hung the baby to a tree later, and when they got ready they killed its mother. It was the only merciful thing they done, I guess, in all their raid, for they made her die a thousand deaths before they really cut off her poor pitiful life."

So I heard the talk running on, and I wondered at the bluff committeeman who broke up the group to get the men in line for a factional caucus.

Did the election of a party favorite, the nomination of a man whose turn had come, or who would be favorable to "our crowd" in his appointments match in importance this terrible menace to life on our Indian frontier? I had heard much of the Saline and the Solomon River valleys. Union soldiers were homesteading those open plains. My father's comrades-in-arms they had been, and he was intensely interested in their welfare. These Union men had wounds still unhealed from service in the Civil War. And the nation they bore these wounds to save, the Government at Washington, was ignorant or indifferent to this danger that threatened them hourly—a danger infinitely worse than death to women. And the State in the vital throes of a biennial election was treating the whole affair as a deplorable incident truly, but one the national government must look out for.

I was young and enthusiastic, but utterly without political ambition. I was only recently out of college, with a scholar's ideals of civic duty. And with all these, I had behind me the years of a frontier life on the border, in which years my experience and inspiration had taught me the value of the American home, and a strong man's duty toward the weak and defenceless. The memories of my mother, the association and training of my father's sister, and my love for Marjie made all women sacred to me. And while these feelings that stirred the finest fibres of my being, and of which I never spoke then, may have been the mark of a less practical nature than most young men have to-day, I account my life stronger, cleaner and purer for having had them.