He quite evidently had sat down and tried to collect his thoughts, for there were marks in the waste indicating the various positions he had taken. He had a small bottle of water with him, but no food.
No sound swept the plain. Bowden may have thought he was entombed in some vast charnel-house of the ages to which Time had brought Nature’s remains and left them without burial. He was on the crest of one-time vast lava beds, a spot where fearful fires once raged beneath his feet. Here the last great battle of the peaks of the continent had probably been fought with thunderbolt and flame hurled from the bowels of the earth. And he was alone. Not even the wretched lizards of the lava region were moving. He called. No voice answered. He walked, but it was in a circle, and he came back time and time again to his starting point. He waited for the dawn—one hope that the sun’s light might give him a trace of the camp. He saw the shade of the night grow deeper and deeper, and then the driving of this blackness back from the east and the coming there of a cold line of grey and then an insolent one of red and a savage yellow with that, and then, with one leap, the sun.
He must have scanned the plain, but there was no sight of camp. He called, he laughed, he cried. He drank his water to the last drop in the little bottle. He walked and ran. He returned to the spot where he had first become bewildered. He was hot and then cold, and the sun rose higher and higher; grew more pitiless with every advance. The white heat beat down on him; it rose in sheets before him. Now the lizards and the mean, creeping things came out, but they passed him by. They could wait. Others had preceded him. After a long time, Bowden threw his hands high in the air, far up to the sun god that was calling to him, although beating him down. He fell flat on his face, and there he slept his last sleep in the land where the sun shines forever and forever.
A week later and Captain Watt died of gastritis, and our party returned to Flagstaff and abandoned the search for the lost mine.
[XIV.]
THE LAND OF THE FAIR GOD.
Captain David L. Payne was a born frontiersman. He left his home in Grant County, Indiana, in 1856, at the age of 20 years. He started west to fight the Mormons, and got as far as Doniphan County, Kansas. Here he found plenty of excitement and joined the Free Soil party. Five years later, when the border was aflame with fire and steel, he was among the first to enlist in the Union army. He served with distinction throughout the war. In 1865 he was honorably discharged at Ft. Leavenworth, with the rank of major. After this he went to Pueblo de Taos, New Mexico, and joined a party under Kit Carson, in an expedition against the Apaches. And after this he was known as the “Cimarron Scout.”
I first met him in the Black Hills in 1876. He was then talking of Oklahoma, called by the Indians The Land of the Fair God. He claimed that the government had no title to the land. The next I noticed of him was in 1880, when he organized a band of raiders to invade Oklahoma and open it for settlement. His first company was thirteen strong. They went as far south as Fort Russell, on the Cimarron, leaving Arkansas City, April 30. They were captured and taken out by United States soldiers. But the brave pioneer was not to be daunted. His followers increased and they hovered upon the banks of the Arkansas River, awaiting the action of a dilatory congress at Washington until the country was thrown open to settlement, April 22, 1889.