The Lions of the Lord

Lions of the Lord, The

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Title: The Lions of the Lord A Tale of the Old West
Author: Harry Leon Wilson
Release Date: March 10, 2004 [EBook #11534]
Language: English
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[Frontispiece: LIFTING OFF HIS BROAD-BRIMMED HAT TO HER
IN A GRACIOUS SWEEP]

THE LIONS OF THE LORD

A Tale of the Old West
By HARRY LEON WILSON
Author of "The Spenders"
Illustrated by ROSE CECIL O'NEILL

Published June, 1903

TO MY WIFE

FOREWORD
In the days of '49 seven trails led from our Western frontier into the
Wonderland that lay far out under the setting sun and called to the
restless. Each of the seven had been blazed mile by mile through the
mighty romance of an empire's founding. Some of them for long
stretches are now overgrown by the herbage of the plain; some have
faded back into the desert they lined; and more than one has been shod
with steel. But along them all flit and brood the memory-ghosts of old,
rich-coloured days. To the shout of teamster, the yell of savage, the
creaking of tented ox-cart, and the rattle of the swifter mail-coach, there
go dim shapes of those who had thrilled to that call of the West;--strong,
brave men with the far look in their eyes, with those magic rude tools
of the pioneer, the rifle and the axe; women, too, equally heroic, of a
stock, fearless, ready, and staunch, bearing their sons and daughters in
fortitude; raising them to fear God, to love their country,--and to labour.
From the edge of our Republic these valiant ones toiled into the dump
of prairie and mountain to live the raw new days and weld them to our
history; to win fertile acres from the wilderness and charm the desert to
blossoming. And the time of these days and these people, with their
tragedies and their comedies, was a time of epic splendour;--more vital
with the stuff and colour of life, I think, than any since the stubborn

gray earth out there was made to yield its treasure.
Of these seven historic highways the one richest in story is the old Salt
Lake Trail: this because at its western end was woven a romance within
a romance;--a drama of human passions, of love and hate, of high faith
and low, of the beautiful and the ugly, of truth and lies; yet with certain
fine fidelities under it all; a drama so close-knit, so amazingly true, that
one who had lightly designed to make a tale there was dismayed by fact.
So much more thrilling was it than any fiction he might have imagined,
so more than human had been the cunning of the Master Dramatist, that
the little make-believe he was pondering seemed clumsy and poor, and
he turned from it to try to tell what had really been.
In this story, then, the things that are strangest have most of truth. The
make-believe is hardly more than a cement to join the queerly wrought
stones of fact that were found ready. For, if the writer has now and
again had to divine certain things that did not show,--yet must have
been,--surely these are not less than truth. One of these deductions is
the Lute of the Holy Ghost who came in the end to be the Little Man of
Sorrows: who loved a woman, a child, and his God, but sinned through
pride of soul;--whose life, indeed, was a poem of sin and retribution.
Yet not less true was he than the Lion of the Lord, the Archer of
Paradise, the Wild Ram of the Mountains, or the gaunt, gray woman
whom hurt love had crazed. For even now, as the tale is done, comes a
dry little note in the daily press telling how such a one actually did the
other day a certain brave, great thing it had seemed the imagined one
must be driven to do. Only he and I, perhaps, will be conscious of the
struggle back of that which was printed; but at least we two shall know
that the Little Man of Sorrows is true, even though the cross where he
fled to say his last prayer in the body has long since fallen and its bars
crumbled to desert dust.