middle; and, to make up for
this, there were quicksands stirring beneath it where the same man
would sink in above his waist, above his shoulders, above his head.
The islands that broke its languid currents were close grown with small
trees, riding low in the water like little ships freighted deep with
greenery. Toward evening, looking to the West, with the dazzle of the
sun on the water, they were a fairy fleet drifting on the silver tide
of dreams.

The wide, slow stream ran in the middle of a wide, flat valley. Then
came a line of broken hills, yellowish and sandy, cleft apart by sharp
indentations, and dry, winding arroyos, down which the buffalo trooped,
thirsty, to the river. When the sun sloped westward, shadows lay clear
in the hollows, violet and amethyst and sapphire blue, transparent
washes of color as pure as the rays of the prism. The hills rolled
back in a turbulence of cone and bluff and then subsided, fell away as
if all disturbance must cease before the infinite, subduing calm of The
Great Plains.

Magic words, invoking the romance of the unconquered West, of the
earth's virgin spaces, of the buffalo and the Indian. In their idle
silence, treeless, waterless, clothed as with a dry pale hair with the
feathered yellow grasses, they looked as if the monstrous creatures of
dead epochs might still haunt them, might still sun their horny sides
among the sand hills, and wallow in the shallows of the river. It was
a bit of the early world, as yet beyond the limit of the young nation's
energies, the earth as man knew it when his eye was focused for far
horizons, when his soul did not shrink before vast solitudes.

Against this sweeping background the Indian loomed, ruler of a kingdom
whose borders faded into the sky. He stood, a blanketed figure,
watching the flight of birds across the blue; he rode, a painted
savage, where the cloud shadows blotted the plain, and the smoke of his
lodge rose over the curve of the earth. Here tribe had fought with
tribe, old scores had been wiped out till the grass was damp with
blood, wars of extermination had raged. Here the migrating villages
made a moving streak of color like a bright patch on a map where there
were no boundaries, no mountains, and but one gleaming thread of water.
In the quietness of evening the pointed tops of the tepees showed dark
against the sky, the blur of smoke tarnishing the glow in the West.
When the darkness came the stars shone on thi