old-time South. And Annie Laurie,
weeping, heard and listened, and wept the more, and blessed God for her
tears!

BOOK II

THE DAY OF THE BUFFALO

CHAPTER IV

BATTERSLEIGH OF THE RILE IRISH

Colonel Henry Battersleigh sat in his tent engaged in the composition
of a document which occasioned him concern. That Colonel Battersleigh
should be using his tent as office and residence--for that such was the
fact even the most casual glance must have determined--was for him a
circumstance offering no special or extraordinary features. His life
had been spent under canvas. Brought up in the profession of arms, so
long as fighting and forage were good it had mattered little to him in
what clime he found his home. He had fought with the English in India,
carried sabre in the Austrian horse, and on his private account drilled
regiments for the Grand Sultan, deep within the interior of a country
which knew how to keep its secrets. When the American civil war began
he drifted to the newest scene of activity as metal to a magnet.
Chance sent him with the Union army, and there he found opportunity for
a cavalry command. "A gintleman like Battersleigh of the Rile Irish
always rides," he said, and natural horseman as well as trained
cavalryman was Battersleigh, tall, lean, flat-backed, and martial even
under his sixty admitted years. It was his claim that no Sudanese
spearsman or waddling assegai-thrower could harm him so long as he was
mounted and armed, and he boasted that no horse on earth could unseat
him. Perhaps none ever had--until he came to the Plains.

For this was on the Plains. When the bitter tide of war had ebbed,
Battersleigh had found himself again without a home. He drifted with
the disintegrating bodies of troops which scattered over the country,
and in course of time found himself in the only portion of America
which seemed to him congenial. Indeed, all the population was adrift,
all the anchors of established things torn loose. In the distracted
South whole families, detesting the new ways of life now thrust upon
them, and seeing no way of retrieving their fortunes in the country
which had borne them, broke away entirely from old associations and
started on in the strange, vague American fashion of that day, in a
hope of finding a newer and perhaps a better country. They moved by
rail, by boat, by wagon, in such way as they could. The old Mountain
Road from Virginia was trodden by many a