ir aggregate will never be
known; for the once remote region of the mid-continent, like the ocean,
rarely gave up its victims. Lives went out there as goes an expiring
candle, suddenly, swiftly, and silently; no record was kept of time or
place. All those who thus died are graveless and monumentless, the great
circle of the heavens is the dome of their sepulchre, and the recurring
blossoms of springtime their only epitaph.

Sometimes the traveller over the Old Trail will suddenly, in the most
unexpected places, come across a little mound, perhaps covered with
stones, under which lie the mouldering bones of some unfortunate
adventurer. Above, now on a rude board, then on a detached rock, or
maybe on the wall of a beetling canyon, he may frequently read, in crude
pencilling or rougher carving, the legend of the dead man's ending.

The line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which
practically runs over the Old Trail for nearly its whole length to
the mountains, is a fertile field of isolated graves. The savage and
soldier, the teamster and scout, the solitary trapper or hunter,
and many others who have gone down to their death fighting with the
relentless nomad of the plains, or have been otherwise ruthlessly cut
off, mark with their last resting-places that well-worn pathway across
the continent.

The tourist, looking from his car-window as he is whirled with the speed
of a tornado toward the snow-capped peaks of the "Great Divide," may
see as he approaches Walnut Creek, three miles east of the town of Great
Bend in Kansas, on the beautiful ranch of Hon. D. Heizer, not far from
the stream, and close to the house, a series of graves, numbering,
perhaps, a score. These have been most religiously cared for by the
patriotic proprietor of the place during all the long years since 1864,
as he believes them to be the last resting-place of soldiers who were
once a portion of the garrison of Fort Zarah, the ruins of which (now
a mere hole in the earth) are but a few hundred yards away, on the
opposite side of the railroad track, plainly visible from the train.

The Walnut debouches into the Arkansas a short distance from where the
railroad crosses the creek, and at this point, too, the trail from Fort
Leavenworth merges into the Old Santa Fe. The broad pathway is very
easily recognized here; for it runs over a hard, flinty, low divide,
that has never been disturbed by the plough, and the traveller has
only to cast