The Girl at the Halfway House | Page 7

features. His life had been spent under canvas. Brought
up in the profession of arms, so long as fighting and forage were good
it had mattered little to him in what clime he found his home. He had
fought with the English in India, carried sabre in the Austrian horse,
and on his private account drilled regiments for the Grand Sultan, deep
within the interior of a country which knew how to keep its secrets.
When the American civil war began he drifted to the newest scene of
activity as metal to a magnet. Chance sent him with the Union army,
and there he found opportunity for a cavalry command. "A gintleman
like Battersleigh of the Rile Irish always rides," he said, and natural
horseman as well as trained cavalryman was Battersleigh, tall, lean,
flat-backed, and martial even under his sixty admitted years. It was his
claim that no Sudanese spearsman or waddling assegai-thrower could
harm him so long as he was mounted and armed, and he boasted that no
horse on earth could unseat him. Perhaps none ever had--until he came
to the Plains.
For this was on the Plains. When the bitter tide of war had ebbed,
Battersleigh had found himself again without a home. He drifted with
the disintegrating bodies of troops which scattered over the country,
and in course of time found himself in the only portion of America
which seemed to him congenial. Indeed, all the population was adrift,
all the anchors of established things torn loose. In the distracted South

whole families, detesting the new ways of life now thrust upon them,
and seeing no way of retrieving their fortunes in the country which had
borne them, broke away entirely from old associations and started on in
the strange, vague American fashion of that day, in a hope of finding a
newer and perhaps a better country. They moved by rail, by boat, by
wagon, in such way as they could. The old Mountain Road from
Virginia was trodden by many a disheartened family who found
Kentucky also smitten, Missouri and Arkansas no better. The West, the
then unknown and fascinating West, still remained beyond, a land of
hope, perhaps a land of refuge. The men of the lower South, also stirred
and unsettled, moved in long columns to the West and Southwest,
following the ancient immigration into Texas. The men of Texas,
citizens of a crude empire of unproved resources, likewise cast about
them restlessly. Their cattle must some day find a market. To the north
of them, still unknown and alluring, lay the new upper country known
as the West.
In the North the story was the same. The young men, taken from the
fields and marts to the camps and marches of the war, could not easily
return to the staid ways of their earlier life. From New England to
Michigan, from Michigan to Minnesota, many Northern families began
to move also toward that West which offered at least opportunity for
change. Thus there poured into the West from many different directions,
but chiefly from two right-angling directions which intersected on the
Plains, a diverse population whose integers were later with phenomenal
swiftness to merge and blend. As in the war the boldest fought, so in
emigration the boldest travelled, and the West had the pick of the land.
In Illinois and Iowa, after the war had ended, you might have seen a
man in flapping blue army overcoat hewing timber for fences on the
forgotten farms, or guiding the plough across the black reeking sod; but
presently you must have also seen the streams of white-topped wagons,
sequel to the white tented fields, moving on, pushing toward the West,
the land of action and adventure, the land of hope and promise.
As all America was under canvas, it was not strange that Colonel
Battersleigh should find his home in a tent, and that this tent should be
pitched upon the Western Plains. Not that he had gone directly to the

West after the mustering out of his regiment. To the contrary, his first
abode had been in the city of New York, where during his brief stay he
acquired a certain acquaintance. Colonel Battersleigh was always a
striking figure, the more so by reason of his costume, which was
invariably the same. His broad cavalry hat, his shapely varnished boots,
his gauntlets, his sweeping cloak, made him fairly historic about the
clubs. His air, lofty, assured, yet ever suave, showed that he classified
himself cheerfully as being of the natural aristocracy of the earth. When
Colonel Battersleigh had occasion to sign his name it was worth a
dinner to see the process, so seriously did he himself regard it.
"Battersleigh"--so stood the name alone, unsupported and
self-sufficient. Seeing which inscription in heavy