The Eagles Heart | Page 4

know;
we're afraid of wild things, most of us."
"Dot Burland isn't."
"Oh, she only pretends; she wants you to think she's brave."
"That's a lie." He said it so savagely that Maud hastened to apologize.
CHAPTER II
HIS LOVE AFFAIRS
Naturally a lad of this temper had his loves. He made no secret of them,
and all the young people in the town knew his sweethearts and the
precise time when his passion changed its course. If a girl pleased him
he courted her with the utmost directness, but he was by no
interpretation a love-sick youth. His likings were more in the nature of

proprietary comradeship, and were expressed without caresses or
ordinary words of endearment.
His courtship amounted to service. He waited about to meet and help
his love, he hastened to defend her and to guide her; and if the favored
one knew her rôle she humored his fancies, permitting him to aid her in
finding her way across a weedy pasture lot or over a tiny little brook
which he was pleased to call a torrent. A smile of derision was fatal. He
would not submit to ridicule or joking. At the first jocular word his
hands clinched and his eyes flamed with anger. His was not a face of
laughter; for the most part it was serious in expression, and his eyes
were rapt with dreams of great deeds.
He had one mate to whom he talked freely, and him he chose often to
be his companion in the woods or on the prairies. This was John Burns,
son of a farmer who lived near the town. Harry spent nearly every
Saturday and Sunday during the summer months on the Burns farm. He
helped Jack during haying and harvest, and when their tasks were done
the two boys wandered away to the bank of the river and there, under
some great basswood tree on delicious sward, they lay and talked of
wild animals and Indians and the West. At this time the great chieftains
of the Sioux, Sitting Bull and Gall, were becoming famous to the world,
and the first reports of the findings of gold in the Black Hills were
being made. A commission appointed by President Grant had made a
treaty with the Sioux wherein Sitting Bull was told, "If you go to this
new reservation and leave Dakota to the settlers, you shall be
unmolested so long as grass grows and water runs."
But the very guard sent in to protect this commission reported "gold in
the grass roots," and the insatiate greed of the white man broke all
bounds--the treaty was ignored, and Sitting Bull, the last chieftain of
the Sioux, calling his people together, withdrew deeper into the
wilderness of Wyoming. The soldiers were sent on the trail, and the
press teemed for months with news of battles and speeches and
campaigns.
All these exciting events Harry and his friend Jack read and discussed
hotly. Jack was eager to own a mine. "I'd like to pick up a nugget," he

said, but Harold was not interested. "I don't care to mine; I'd like to be
with General Custer. I'd like to be one of the scouts. I'd like to have a
coat like that." He pointed at one of the pictures wherein two or three
men in fringed buckskin shirts and wide hats were galloping across a
rocky plain.
Many times as the two boys met to talk over these alluring matters the
little town and the dusty lanes became exceedingly tame and
commonplace.
Harold's eyes glowed with passion as he talked to his sweetheart of
these wild scenes, and she listened because he was so alluring as he lay
at her feet, pouring out a vivid recital of his plans.
"I'm not going to stay here much longer," he said; "it's too dull. I can't
stand much more school. If it wasn't for you I'd run away right now."
Dot only smiled back at him and laid her hand on his hair. She was his
latest sweetheart. He loved her for her vivid color, her abundant and
beautiful hair, and also because she was a sympathetic listener. She, on
her part, enjoyed the sound of his eager voice and the glow of his deep
brown eyes. They were both pupils in the little seminary in the town,
and he saw her every day walking to and from the recitation halls. He
often carried her books for her, and in many other little ways insisted
on serving her.
Almost without definable reason the "Wild West" came to be a land of
wonder, lit as by some magical light. Its cañons, arroyos, and mesquite,
its bronchos, cowboys, Indians, and scouts filled the boy's mind with
thoughts of daring, not much unlike the