the things we're seeing now will haunt us through
the years;
Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears;
Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with
a gray,
To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day?

--ROBERT W. SERVICE.

However darkly the sun may go down on hope and love, the real sun shines
on, day after day, with its inexorable call to duty. In less than a week
after I had left Eloise and the vague hope of a home of my own under the
big elm-trees of Burlingame, Governor Crawford of Kansas sent forth a
call for a battalion of four companies of soldiers, and I heard the call
and answered it.

It was to be known as the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry, with Col. Horace L.
Moore, a veteran soldier of tried mettle, at the head. We were to go at
once to Fort Harker, in the valley of the Smoky Hill River, to begin a
campaign against the Indians, who were laying waste the frontier
settlements and attacking wagon-trains on the Sante Fe Trail.

On the evening before I left home I sat on the veranda of the Clarenden
house, waiting for Uncle Esmond to join me, when suddenly Beverly
Clarenden strode over the edge of the hill. The sunny smile and the
merry twinkle of his eye were Bev's own, and there wasn't a line on his
face to show whether it belonged to the happy lover or the rejected
suitor. I thought I could always read his moods when he had any. He had
none to-night.

"I just got in from Burlingame. At what hour do you leave to-morrow? I'm
going along to chaperon you, as usual," he declared.

"Why, Beverly Clarenden, I thought you were fixed at Burlingame, selling
molasses and calico by the gallon," I exclaimed, but my real thought was
not given to words.

"And let the Cheyennes, and Kiowas, and Arapahoes, and other desperadoes
of the plains gnaw clear into the heart of us? Not your uncle Esmond
Clarenden's nephew. And, Gail, this won't be anything like we have had
since those six Kiowas staked you out on Pawnee Rock once. The
thoroughbred Indians are bad enough, but there is a half-breed leader of
a band of Dog Indians that's worst of all. He's of the yellow kind, with
wolf's fangs. A Mexican on the trail told me that this half-breed ties
up with the worst of every tribe from the Coast Range mountains to
Tecumseh, Kansas," Beverly declared.

"I remember that Mexican. I saw him at the well in Burlingame," I
replied, turning to look