After a time my host turned toward me in the gloom and looked steadily into my eyes.
"He's taking my measure," I thought.
"Well," I said, "will I do?"
"Yes," he answered. "Your father told me once in the army that his boy could ride like a Comanche, and turn his back to a mark and hit it over his shoulder." He smiled.
"That's because one evening I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to do both at once, although we never had any shooting to do that really counted."
"Baronet"—there was a tone in Morton's voice that gripped and held me—"you have come here in a good time. We need you now. Men of your build and endurance and skill are what this West's got to have."
"Well, I'm here," I answered seriously.
"I shall leave for Fort Harker to-morrow with a crowd of men from the valley to join a company Sheridan has called for," he went on. "You know about the Indian raid the first of this month. The Cheyennes came across here, and up on Spillman Creek and over on the Solomon they killed a dozen or more people. They burned every farm-house, and outraged every woman, and butchered every man and child they could lay hands on. You heard about it at Topeka."
"Hasn't that Indian massacre been avenged yet?" I cried.
Clearly in my memory came the two women of my dream of long ago. How deeply that dream had impressed itself upon my mind! And then there flashed across my brain the image of Marjie, as she looked the night when she stood in the doorway with the lamplight on her brown curls, and it became clear to me that she was safe at home. Oh, the joy of that moment! The unutterable thankfulness that filled my soul was matched in intensity only by the horror that fills it even now when I think of a white woman in Indian slave-bonds. And while I was thinking of this I was listening to Morton's more minute account of what had been taking place about him, and why he and his neighbors were to start on the next day for Fort Harker down on the Smoky Hill River.