ht,
restless man, quick-witted, with somewhat polished manners and a gift
of persuasion in his speech.

Near this store was Conlow's blacksmith shop, where the low-browed,
black-eyed Conlow family have shod horses and mended wagons since
anybody can remember. They were the kind of people one instinctively
does not trust, and yet nobody could find a true bill against them. The
shop had thick stone walls. High up under the eaves on the north side a
long narrow slit, where a stone was missing, let out a bar of sullen red
light. Old Conlow did not know about that chink for years, for it was
only from the bluff above the town that the light could be seen.

Our advent in Springvale was just at the time of its transition from a
plains trading-post to a Territorial town with ambition for settlement
and civilization. I can see now that John Baronet deserved the place he
came to hold in that frontier community, for he was a State-builder.

"I should feel more dacent fur all etarnity jist to be buried in the
same cimet'ry wid Judge Bar'net," O'mie once declared. "I should walk
into kingdom-come, dignified and head up, saying to the kaper av the
pearly gates, kind o' careless-like, 'I'm from that little Kansas town
av Springvale an' ye'll check up my mortial remains over in the
cimet'ry, be my neighbor, Judge Bar'net, if ye plaze.'"

It was O'mie's way of saying what most persons of the community felt
toward my father from the time he drove into Springvale in the purple
twilight of that June evening in 1854.

Irving Whately's stock of merchandise was installed in the big stone
building on the main corner of the village, where the straggling Indian
trails from the south and the trail from the new settlement out on
Fingal's Creek converged on the broad Santa Fe trail. Amos Judson, a
young settler, became his clerk and general helper. In the front room
over this store was John Baronet's law office, and his sign swinging
above Whately's seemed always to link those two names together.

Opposite this building was the village tavern. It was a wide two-story
structure, also of stone, set well back from the street, with a double
veranda along the front and the north side. A huge oak tree grew before
it, and a flagstone walk led up to the veranda steps. In big black
lettering its inscription over the door told the wayfarer on the old
trail that this was

THE CAMBRIDGE HOUSE.
C. C. GENTRY, PROP.

Cam Gentry (his real name was Ca