"It seems to have its serpent already, Mr. Morton," I replied.
"Well, the serpent can be crushed. Come out and help us do it. We need numbers, especially in men of endurance." We were at the hotel door. Morton bade me good-bye by saying, "Don't forget; come our way when you get the Western fever."
Governor Crawford returned too late for me to catch the stage for Springvale on the same day. Having a night more to spend in the capital, it seemed proper for me to make amends for my unpardonable forgetfulness of Rachel Melrose's invitation to tea by calling on her in the evening. Her aunt's home was at the far side of the town beyond the modest square stone building that was called Lincoln College then. It was only a stone's throw from the State Capitol, the walls of the east wing of which were then being built.
I remember it was a beautiful moonlit night, in early August, and Rachel asked me to take a stroll over the prairie to the southwest. The day had been very hot, and the west had piled up some threatening thunderheads. But the evening breezes fanned them away over the far horizon line and the warm night air was light and dry. The sky was white with the clear luminous moonlight of the open Plains country.
Rachel and I had wandered idly along the gentle rise of ground until we could quite overlook the little treeless town with this Lincoln College and the jagged portion of the State House wing gleaming up beyond.
"Hadn't we better turn back now? Your aunt cautioned us two strangers here not to get lost." I was only hinting my wishes.
"Oh, let's go on to that tree. It's the only one here in this forsaken country. Let's pay our respects to it," Rachel urged.
She was right. To an Easterner's eye it was a forsaken country. From the Shunganunga Creek winding beneath a burden of low, black underbrush, northward to the river with its fringe of huge cottonwoods, not a tree broke the line of vision save this one sturdy young locust spreading its lacy foliage in dainty grace on the very summit of the gentle swell of land between the two streams. Up to its pretty shadowed spaces we took our way. The grass was dry and brown with the August heat, and we rested awhile on the moonlit prairie.
Rachel was strikingly handsome, and the soft light lent a certain tone to her beauty. Her hair and eyes were very dark, and her face was clear cut. There was a dash of boldness, an assumption of authority all prettily accented with smiles and dimples that was very bewitching. She was a subtle flatterer, and even the wisest men may be caught by that bait. It was the undercurrent of sympathy, product of my life-long ideals, my intense pity for the defenceless frontier, that divided my mind and led me away from temptation that night.
"Rachel Melrose, we must go home," I insisted at last. "This tree is all right, but I could show you a cottonwood out above the Neosho that dwarfs this puny locust. And yet this is a gritty sort of sapling to stand up here and grow and grow. I wonder if ever the town will reach out so far as this."