It had served its purpose, had fulfilled its mission, and
those who once ruled it now were gone. The wild herds and the wild men
came there no longer, and there were neither hosts nor those needing
hospitality. And Mary Ellen, the stately visitant of his sleeping or
his waking dreams, no longer might be seen in person at the Halfway
House. Recreant, defeated, but still refusing aid, she had gone back
to her land of flowers. It was Franklin's one comfort that she had
never known into whose hands had passed--at a price far beyond their
actual worth--the lands of the Halfway House, which had so rapidly
built up for her a competency, which had cleared her of poverty, only
to re-enforce her in her pride.

Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the
discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin
possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led
him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the
crucial moment of his life. His nature was not more imaginative than
comprehensive.

To a very few men Edward Franklin has admitted that he once dreamed of
a hill topped by a little fire, whose smoke dipped and waved and caught
him in its fold. In brief, he got into saddle, and journeyed to the
Hill of Dreams.

The Hill of Dreams dominated the wide and level landscape over which it
had looked out through hundreds of slow, unnoted years. From it once
rose the signal smokes of the red men, and here it was that many a
sentinel had stood in times long before a white face was ever seen upon
the Plains. Here often was erected the praying lodge of the young
aspirant for wisdom, who stood there and lifted up his hands, saying:
"O sun! O air! O earth! O spirits, hear me pray! Give me aid, give
me wisdom, so that I may know!"

Here on the Hill of Dreams, whence the eye might sweep to the fringed
sand hills on the south, east to the river many miles away, and north
and west almost to the swell of the cold steppes that lead up to the
Rocky Range, the red men had sometimes come to lay their leaders when
their day of hunting and of war was over. Thus the place came to have
extraordinary and mysterious qualities ascribed to it, on which
account, in times gone by, men who were restless, troubled, disturbed,
dissatisfied, came thither to fast and pray. Here they builded their
little fires, and here, night and day, they besought the sky, the sun,
the firmament