“Yes,” said Hugh, “more than twenty years from the time of his supposed death. He fought in the battle of Bethel Church and was numbered among the missing, but we were unable to establish the fact of his death. My mother died when I was a mere child, and then I lived with an uncle, who has had charge of my affairs; but at last everything is settled, and the money is now to my credit in the bank.”
“And so you are going to the frontier. I fear you will soon grow tired of it,” said Jack, “the contrast will be so great. What sort of man is he with whom you are going to associate yourself?”
“I cannot say,” replied Hugh, as he knocked the ashes from his cigar, “I have never met him. He was captain of the company in which my father was first lieutenant, and I have had considerable correspondence with him in trying to obtain information in regard to my father’s death. This correspondence has, strangely enough, led to the present contemplated business arrangement.”
“Well, we must see much of each other between now and the time you start.”
“My dear Jack,” replied Hugh, “I have already resigned my position and I shall leave to-morrow for my new home. I have called to-night to have an old-time chat, and to say farewell.”
Jack looked at his friend incredulously, and said, half indignantly, “Well, why have n’t you called before?”
“I have called nearly every evening for the past two weeks,” replied Hugh, “but you were never at home.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jack, looking up at the tiers of books on the shelves, and plucking his mustache, reflectively. “Yes, that’s so, I have been away—professional calls, you know.”
Soon Hugh Stanton took leave of his friend and the following day found him en route for Meade, Kansas.
After crossing the “Big Muddy” at Kansas City, Hugh began to realize, for the first time, that he was entering the “Great Plains”—that he was, indeed, in the West. He gazed meditatively from the car windows and beheld, in rapturous anticipation, the vast, rolling, monotonous prairies. He was coming to a land of promise, a land of hopes and of disappointments, a land of vast herds and of writhing winds, a land of struggling farmers and of princely cattle barons, a land of wild flowers and of sunshine. Here, Hugh Stanton was soon to become an actor on the realistic stage of the Southwest. He was to become, first, an actor in melodrama, then tragedy, and finally he was to play a part in a mighty orchestral avalanche of mystery.