as satisfied to halt there--to build his cabin
and his corral.

Discontent and longing, and then hate, passed into oblivion. These
useless passions could not long survive in such an environment. By and
by the old trapper's only link with the past was memory of a stalwart
youth, and of a girl with violet eyes, and of their sad and wonderful
romance, in which he had played a happy part.

The rosy dawn, the days of sun and cloud, the still, windy nights,
the solemn stars, the moon-blanched valley with its grazing herds, the
beautiful wild mourn of the hunting wolf and the whistle of the stag,
and always and ever the murmur of the stream--in these, and in the
solitude and loneliness of their haunts, he found his goal, his
serenity, the truth and best of remaining life for him.

37

A band of Sioux warriors rode out upon a promontory of the hills,
high above the great expanse of plain. Long, lean arms were raised and
pointed.

A chief dismounted and strode to the front of his band. His war-bonnet
trailed behind him; there were unhealed scars upon his bronze body; his
face was old, full of fine, wavy lines, stern, craggy, and inscrutable;
his eyes were dark, arrowy lightnings.

They beheld, far out and down upon the plain, a long, low, moving object
leaving a trail of smoke. It was a train on the railroad. It came from
the east and crept toward the west. The chief watched it, and so did his
warriors. No word was spoken, no sign made, no face changed.

But what was in the mind and the heart and the soul of that great chief?

This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of
an alien tribe; that split the silence as hideously as the long track
split the once smooth plain; that was made of iron and wood; this thing
of the white man's, coming from out of the distance where the Great
Spirit lifted the dawn, meant the end of the hunting-grounds and the
doom of the Indian. Blood had flowed; many warriors lay in their last
sleep under the trees; but the iron monster that belched fire had gone
only to return again. Those white men were many as the needles of the
pines. They fought and died, but always others came.

The chief was old and wise, taught by sage and star and mountain and
wind and the loneliness of the prairie-land. He recognized a superior
race, but not a nobler one. White men would glut the treasures of water
and earth. The Indian had been born to hunt his meat, to repel his red
foes