robe which I
used fired his imagination. For the first time in our acquaintanceship,
I succeeded in interesting him in the Indian. He was especially excited
by the gesture of covering the mouth to express awe, and a few days
later he showed me several small figures which he had sketched,
suggestions which afterwards became the splendid monuments of Silmee and
Blackhawk. He never lost the effect of the noble gestures which I had
reproduced for him. The nude red man was a hackneyed subject, but Brown
Bear with his robe, afforded precisely the stimulus of which he stood in
need.

This trip to Indian Territory turned out to be a very important event in
my life. First of all it enabled me to complete the writing of _The
Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, and started me on a long series of
short stories depicting the life of the red man. It gave me an enormous
amount of valuable material and confirmed me in my conviction that the
Indian needed an interpreter, but beyond all these literary gains, I
went back to Wisconsin filled with a fierce desire to own some of that
beautiful prairie over which we had ridden.

This revived hunger for land generated in me a plan for establishing a
wide ranch down there, an estate to which we could retire in February
and March. "We can meet the spring half-way," I explained to my father.
"I want a place where I can keep saddle horses and cattle. You must go
with me and see it sometime. It is as lovely as Mitchell County was in
1870."

To this end I wrote to my brother in Mexico. "Leave the rubber business
and come to Oklahoma. I am going to buy a ranch there and need you as
superintendent."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Standing Rock and Lake McDonald

It was full summer when we got back to Wisconsin, and The Old Homestead
was at its best. The garden was red with ripening fruit, the trees thick
with shining leaves, and the thrushes and catbirds were singing in quiet
joy. In the fields the growing corn was showing its ordered spears, and
the wheat was beginning to wave in the gentle wind. No land could be
more hospitable, more abounding or more peaceful than our valley.

With her New Daughter again beside her life seemed very complete and
satisfying to my mother, and I was quite at ease until one night, as she
and I were sitting alone in the dusk, she confided to me, for the first
time, her conviction that she had but a short time to live. Her tone, as
well as her words, shocked me, for sh