ockport.

"They may reside at the bottom of the sea for all that I care," I said
thoughtlessly, not understanding then the shadow that fell for the
moment on my aunt's serene face.

Long afterwards when she slept beside my father in the quiet Springvale
cemetery on the bluff beyond Fingal's Creek, I found among her letters
the romance of her life. I knew then for the first time that Rachel's
uncle, the Ferdinand Melrose whose life was lost at sea, was the one for
whom this brave kind woman had mourned. Loving as the Baronets do, even
unto death, she had gone down the lonely years, forgetting herself in
the broad, beautiful, unselfish life she gave to those about her.

It was late in the August of the following year, when the Kansas
prairies were brownest and the summer heat the fiercest, that I was met
at the courthouse door one afternoon by a lithe, coppery Osage Indian
boy, who handed me a bundle, saying, "From Hard Rope, for John Baronet's
son."

"Well, all right, sonny; only it's about time for the gentleman in there
to be known as Philip Baronet's father. He never fought the Cheyennes.
He's just the father of the man who did. What's the tariff due on this
junk?"

The Osage did not smile, but he answered mildly enough, "What you will
pay."

I was not cross with the world. I could afford to be generous, even at
the risk of having the whole Osage tribe trailing at my heels, and
begging for tobacco and food and trinkets. I loaded that young buck to
the guards with the things an Indian prizes, and sent him away.

Then in my own office I undid the bundle. It was the old scarlet blanket
with the white circular centre, the pattern Jean Pahusca always wore.
This one was dirty and frayed and splotched. I turned from it with
loathing. In the folds of the cloth a sealed letter was securely
fastened. Some soldier had written it for Hard Rope, and the penmanship
and language were more than average fine. But the story it told I could
not exult over, although a sense of lifted pressure in some corner of
my mind came with the reading.

Briefly it recited that Jean Pahusca, Kiowa renegade, was dead. Custer's
penalty for him had been to give him over to the Kiowas as their
captive. When the tribe left Fort Sill in March, Satanta had had him
brought bound to the Kiowa village then on the lower Washita. His crime,
committed on the day of Custer's fight with Black Kettle, was the
heinous one of stealing his Uncle Satanta's you