I merely nodded.
"I want to talk," he went on.
"Well, talk away, Hard Rope." I was glad to quit thinking.
What he told me there by the rippling Washita River I did not repeat for many months, but I wrung his hand when I said good-bye. Of all the scouts with Custer that we left behind when we started northward, none had so large a present of tobacco as Hard Rope.
My father had demanded that I return to Springvale as soon as our regiment was mustered out. Morton was still in the East, and I had no foothold in the Saline Valley as I had hoped in the Fall to have. Nor was there any other place that opened its doors to me. And withal I was homesick—desperately, ravenously homesick. I wanted to see my father and Aunt Candace, to look once more on the peaceful Neosho and the huge oak trees down in its fertile valley. For nearly half a year I had not seen a house, nor known a civilized luxury. No child ever yearned for home and mother as I longed for Springvale. And most of all came an overwhelming eagerness to see Marjie once more. She was probably Mrs. Judson now, unless Jean—but Hard Rope had eased my mind a little there—and I had no right even to think of her. Only I was young, and I had loved her so long. All that fierce battle with myself which I fought out on the West Prairie on the night she refused to let me speak to her had to be fought over again. And this time, marching northward over the April Plains toward Fort Hays, this time, I was hopelessly vanquished. I, Philip Baronet, who had fought with fifty against a thousand on the Arickaree; who had gone with Custer to the Sweetwater in the dreary wastes of the Texas desert; I who had a little limp now and then in my right foot, left out too long in the cold, too long made to keep step in weary ways on endlessly wearing marches; I who had lost the softness of the boy's physique and who was muscled like a man, with something of the military bearing hammered mercilessly upon me in the days of soldier life—I was still madly in love with a girl who had refused all my pleadings and was even now, maybe, another man's wife. Oh, cold and terror and starvation were all bad enough, but this was unendurable.
"I will go home as my father wishes," I said. "I do not need to stay there, but I will go now for a while and feel once more what civilization means. Then—I will go to the Plains, or somewhere else." So I argued as we came one April day into Fort Hays. Letters from home were awaiting me, urging me to come at once; and I went, leaving O'mie to follow later when he should have rested at the Fort a little.
All Kansas was in its Maytime glory. From the freshly ploughed earth came up that sweet wholesome odor that like the scent of new-mown hay carries its own traditions of other days to each of us. The young orchards—there were not many orchards in Kansas then—were all a blur of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended with the shifting shades of green. Along the waterways the cottonwood's silvery branches, tipped with tender young leaves fluttering in the soft wind, stood up proudly above the scrubby bronze and purple growths hardly yet in bud and leaf. From every gentle swell the landscape swept away to the vanishing line of distances in billowy seas of green and gold, while far overhead arched the deep-blue skies of May. Fleecy clouds, white and soft as foam, drifted about in the limitless fields of ether. The glory of the new year, the fresh sweet air, the spirit of budding life, set the pulses a-tingle with the very joy of being. Like a dream of Paradise lay the Neosho Valley in its wooded beauty, with field and farm, the meadow, and the open unending prairie rolling away from it, wave on wave, in the Maytime grace and grandeur. Through this valley the river itself wound in and out, glistening like molten silver in the open spaces, and gliding still and shadowy by overhanging cliff and wooded covert.
"Dever," I said to the stage driver when we had reached the top of the divide and looked southward to where all this magnificence of nature was lavishly spread out, "Dever, do you remember that passage in the Bible about the making of the world long ago, 'And God saw that it was good'? Well, here's where all that happened."
Dever laughed a crowing laugh of joy. He had hugged me when I took the stage, I didn't know why. When it came to doing the nice thing, Dever had a sense of propriety sometimes that better-bred folk might have envied. And this journey home proved it.
"I've got a errant up west. D'ye's lief come into town that way?" he asked me.