the
State. If at the end of that time you are within the limits of Kansas,
you must answer to me in the court-room over there; and, Tell Mapleson,
you know what's before you. I came to the West to help build it up. I
cannot render my State a greater service than by driving you from its
borders; and so long as I live I shall bar your entrance to a land that,
in spite of all it has to bear, grows a larger crop of honest men with
the conquest of each acre of the prairie soil."

CHAPTER XXVII

SUNSET BY THE SWEETWATER

And we count men brave who on land and wave fear not to die; but still,
Still first on the rolls of the world's great souls are the men who
have feared to kill.

--EDMUND VANCE COOKE.

Jean Pahusca turned at the sound of O'mie's step on the stone. The red
sun had blinded his eyes and he could not see clearly at first. When he
did see, O'mie's presence and the captive unbound and staggering to his
feet, surprised the Indian and held him a moment longer. The confusion
at the change in war's grim front passed quickly, however,--he was only
half Indian,--and he was himself again. He darted toward us, swift as a
serpent. Clutching O'mie by the throat and lifting him clear of the rock
shelf the Indian threw him headlong down the side of the bluff, crashing
the bushes as he fell. The knife that had cut the cords that bound me,
the same knife that would have scalped Marjie and taken the boy's life
in the Hermit's Cave, was flung from O'mie's hand. It rang on the stone
and slid down in the darkness below. Then the half-breed hurled himself
upon me and we clinched there by the cliff's edge for our last conflict.

I was in Jean's land now. I had come to my final hour with him. The
Baronets were never cowardly. Was it inherited courage, or was it the
spirit of power in that letter, Marjie's message of love to me, that
gave me grace there? Followed then a battle royal, brute strength
against brute strength. All the long score of defeated effort, all the
jealousy and hate of years, all the fury of final conflict, all the mad
frenzy of the instinct of self-preservation, all the savage lust for
blood (most terrible in the human tiger), were united in Jean. He
combined a giant's strength and an Indian's skill with the dominant
courage and coolness of a son of France. Against these things I put my
strength in that strange struggle on the rocky ledge in the gathering
twilight of that February d