ed into me constitution an' by-laws to
kape my thoughts from floatin' too. I'll never know rightly whin I rode
an' whin I was dragged, an' whin I walked. It was a runnin' fight av
infantry and cavalry, such as the Neosho may never see again, betwixt
the two av us."

Blind, trustful fool that I had been, thinking after all Le Claire's
warnings that Jean had been a good, loyal, chivalrous Indian, protecting
Marjie from harm.

"And to think we have thought all this time there were a dozen Rebels
making away with you, and never dreamed you had deliberately put
yourself into the hands of the strongest and worst enemy you could
have!"

"It was to save a woman, Phil," O'mie said simply. "He could only kill
me. He wouldn't have been that good to her. You'd done the same yoursilf
to save anny woman, aven a stranger to you. Wait an' see."

How easily forgotten things come back when we least expect them. There
came to me, as O'mie spoke, the memory of my dream the night after Jean
had sought Marjie's life out on the Red Range prairie. The night after I
talked with my father of love and of my mother. That night two women
whom I had never seen before were in my dreams, and I had struggled to
save them from peril as though they were of my own flesh and blood.

"You will do it," O'mie went on. "You were doing more. Who was it wint
down along the creek side av town where the very worst pro-slavery
fellows is always coiled and ready to spring, wint in the dark to wake
up folks that lived betwixt them on either side, who was ready to light
on 'em at a minute's notice? Who wint upstairs above thim as was gettin'
ready to burn 'em in their beds, an' walked quiet and cool where one
wrong step meant to be throttled in the dark? Don't talk to me av
courage."

"But, O'mie, it was all chance with us. You went where danger was
certain."

"It was my part, Phil, an' I ain't no shirker just because I'm not tin
feet tall an' don't have to be weighed on Judson's stock scales." O'mie
rested awhile on the pillows. Then he continued his story.

"They was more or less border raidin' betwixt Jean an' me till we got
beyont the high cliff above the Hermit's Cave. When I came to after one
of his fists had bumped me head he was urgin' his pony to what it didn't
want. The river was roarin' below somewhere an' it was black as the
grave's insides. It was way up there that in a minute's lull in the
hostilities, I caught the faint refrain:

'Does the