en out in Western Kansas have had the same agony of soul that
Kathleen O'Meara suffered when she found her boy was stolen. In her
despair she started after the tribe, wandering lost and starving many
days on the prairie until a kind-hearted Osage chief found her and took
her to our blessed Mission down the river. Here a strange thing
happened. Before she had been there a week, her husband, Thomas O'Meara,
came from a trapping tour on the Arkansas River. With him was a little
child he had rescued from the Kiowas in a battle at Pawnee Rock. It was
his own child, although he did not know it then. In this battle he was
told that a Frenchman had been killed. The name was the same as that of
the Frenchman he had known in New York. Can you picture the joy of that
reunion? You who have had a wife to love, a son to cherish?"

My father's heart was full. All day his own boy's face had been before
him, a face so like to the woman whose image he held evermore in sacred
memory.

"But their joy was short-lived, for Mrs. O'Meara never recovered from
her hardships on the prairie; she died in a few weeks. Her husband was
killed by the Comanches shortly after her death. His claim here he left
to his son, over whom the Mission assumed guardianship. O'mie was
transferred to St. Mary's for some reason, and the priest who started to
take him there stopped here to find out about his father's land. But the
records were not available. Fingal, for whom Fingal's Creek was named,
also known as Judge Fingal, held possession of all the records,
and--how, I never knew--but in some way he prevented the priest from
finding out anything. Fingal was a Southern man; he met a violent death
that year. You know O'mie's story after that." Le Claire paused, and a
sadness swept over his face.

"But that doesn't finish the Frenchman's story," he continued presently.

"The night that O'mie's mother left her home in the draw, the French
woman who had journeyed far to find her husband came to Springvale. You
know what she found. The belongings of another woman. It was she who
slipped into the Neosho that night. The Frenchman was in the fight at
Pawnee Rock. After that he disappeared. But he had entered a formal
claim to the land as the husband of Patrick O'Meara's widow, heir to her
property. You see he held a double grip. One through the letter--forged,
of course--the other through the claim to a union that never existed."

"Seems to me you've a damned lot to