e night?"

"Oh, during the war when the border ruffians and Copperheads terrorized
our town."

"You are like your father, I see." He did not say in what particular;
and I added, "I hope I am."

We finished the meal in silence. Then we sat down by the west doorway
and saw the whole Saline Valley shimmer through the soft glow of
twilight and lose itself at length in the darkness that folded down
about it. A gentle breeze swept along from somewhere in the far
southwest, a thousand insects chirped in the grasses. Down by the river
a few faint sounds of night birds could be heard, and then loneliness
and homesickness had their time, denied during every other hour of the
twenty-four.

After a time my host turned toward me in the gloom and looked steadily
into my eyes.

"He's taking my measure," I thought.

"Well," I said, "will I do?"

"Yes," he answered. "Your father told me once in the army that his boy
could ride like a Comanche, and turn his back to a mark and hit it over
his shoulder." He smiled.

"That's because one evening I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put
up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of
his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to
do both at once, although we never had any shooting to do that really
counted."

"Baronet"--there was a tone in Morton's voice that gripped and held
me--"you have come here in a good time. We need you now. Men of your
build and endurance and skill are what this West's got to have."

"Well, I'm here," I answered seriously.

"I shall leave for Fort Harker to-morrow with a crowd of men from the
valley to join a company Sheridan has called for," he went on. "You know
about the Indian raid the first of this month. The Cheyennes came across
here, and up on Spillman Creek and over on the Solomon they killed a
dozen or more people. They burned every farm-house, and outraged every
woman, and butchered every man and child they could lay hands on. You
heard about it at Topeka."

"Hasn't that Indian massacre been avenged yet?" I cried.

Clearly in my memory came the two women of my dream of long ago. How
deeply that dream had impressed itself upon my mind! And then there
flashed across my brain the image of Marjie, as she looked the night
when she stood in the doorway with the lamplight on her brown curls, and
it became clear to me that she was safe at home. Oh, the joy of that
moment! The unutterable thankfulne