Vanguards of the Plains | Page 2

intensely blue; and,
hanging like a spray of glorious blossoms flung high above me, the
swaying folds of the wind-caressed flag, now drooping on its tall staff,
now swelling full and free, straight from its gripping halyards.
Between me and the fort many people were passing to and fro, some of
whom were to walk with me down the long trail of years. Evermore
that April day stands out as the beginning of things for me. Dim are the
days behind it, a jumble of happy childish hours, each keen enough as
the things of childhood go; but from that one day to the present hour
the unforgotten deeds of busy years run clearly in my memory as I lift
my pen to write somewhat of their dramatic record.
And that this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and
look forward from the beginning--a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes,
sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of
lightning cleaving through its blackness. But nowhere dull, nowhere
without design in every brush-stroke.
I had gone out on the bluff to watch for the big fish that Bill Banney, a
young Kentuckian over at the fort, had told me were to be seen only on
those April days when the Missouri was running north instead of south.
And that when little boys kept very still, the fish would come out of the
water and play leap-frog on the sand-bars.
If I failed to see them this morning, I meant to run back to the
parade-ground and play leap-frog myself with my cousin Beverly, who
wanted proof for most of Bill Banney's stories. Beverly was growing
wise and lanky for his age. I was still chubby, and in most things
innocent, and inclined to believe all that I heard, or I should not have
been taken in by that fish story.
We were orphans with no recollection of any other home than the log
house near the fort. We had been fathered and mothered by our uncle,

Esmond Clarenden, owner of the little store across the square from our
house, and a larger establishment down at Independence on the
Missouri River.
Always a wonderful man to me was that Esmond Clarenden, product of
one of the large old New England colleges. He found time to guard our
young years with the same diplomatic system by which he controlled
all of his business affairs. He laid his plans carefully and never swerved
from carrying them through afterward; he insisted on order in
everything; he rendered value for value in his contracts; he chose his
employees carefully, and trusted them fully; he had a keen sense of
humor, a genial spirit of good-will, and he loved little children. Fitted
as he was by culture and genius to have entered into the greater
opportunities of the Eastern States, he gave himself to the real
up-building of the West, and in the larger comfort and prosperity and
peace of the Kansas prairies of to-day his soul goes marching on.
The waters, as I watched them, were all running south toward that
vague, down-stream world shut off by trees at a bend of the course. I
waited a long time there for the current to shift to the north, wondering
meanwhile about those level-topped forests, and what I might see
beyond them if I were sitting on their flat crests. And, as I wondered,
the first dim sense of being shut in came filtering through my childish
consciousness. I could not cross the river. Big as my playground had
always been, I had never been out of sight of the fort's flagstaff
up-stream, nor down-stream. The wooded ravines blocked me on the
southwest. What lay beyond these limits I had tried to picture again and
again. I had been a dreamer all of my short life, and this new feeling of
being shut in, held back, from something slipped upon me easily.
As I sat on the bluff in the April sunshine, I turned my face toward the
west and stretched out my chubby arms for larger freedom. I wanted to
_see the open level places_, wanted till it hurt me. I could cry easily
enough for some things. I could not cry for this. It was too deep for
tears to reach. Moreover, this new longing seemed to drop down on me
suddenly and overwhelm me, until I felt almost as if I were caught in a
net.
As I stared with half-seeing eyes toward the wooded ravines beyond the
fort, suddenly through the budding branches I caught sight of a
horseman riding down a half-marked trail into a deep hollow.

Horsemen were common enough to forget in a moment, but when this
one reappeared on the hither side of the ravine,