went on.

"Well, talk away, Hard Rope." I was glad to quit thinking.

What he told me there by the rippling Washita River I did not repeat for
many months, but I wrung his hand when I said good-bye. Of all the
scouts with Custer that we left behind when we started northward, none
had so large a present of tobacco as Hard Rope.

My father had demanded that I return to Springvale as soon as our
regiment was mustered out. Morton was still in the East, and I had no
foothold in the Saline Valley as I had hoped in the Fall to have. Nor
was there any other place that opened its doors to me. And withal I was
homesick--desperately, ravenously homesick. I wanted to see my father
and Aunt Candace, to look once more on the peaceful Neosho and the huge
oak trees down in its fertile valley. For nearly half a year I had not
seen a house, nor known a civilized luxury. No child ever yearned for
home and mother as I longed for Springvale. And most of all came an
overwhelming eagerness to see Marjie once more. She was probably Mrs.
Judson now, unless Jean--but Hard Rope had eased my mind a little
there--and I had no right even to think of her. Only I was young, and I
had loved her so long. All that fierce battle with myself which I fought
out on the West Prairie on the night she refused to let me speak to her
had to be fought over again. And this time, marching northward over the
April Plains toward Fort Hays, this time, I was hopelessly vanquished.
I, Philip Baronet, who had fought with fifty against a thousand on the
Arickaree; who had gone with Custer to the Sweetwater in the dreary
wastes of the Texas desert; I who had a little limp now and then in my
right foot, left out too long in the cold, too long made to keep step in
weary ways on endlessly wearing marches; I who had lost the softness of
the boy's physique and who was muscled like a man, with something of the
military bearing hammered mercilessly upon me in the days of soldier
life--I was still madly in love with a girl who had refused all my
pleadings and was even now, maybe, another man's wife. Oh, cold and
terror and starvation were all bad enough, but this was unendurable.

"I will go home as my father wishes," I said. "I do not need to stay
there, but I will go now for a while and feel once more what
civilization means. Then--I will go to the Plains, or somewhere else."
So I argued as we came one April day into Fort Hays. Letters from home
were awaiting me, urging me to