every low-spoken word. What whim of satirist chance had put him there,
what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know,
could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew
only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal. Slowly now,
weary to death with the long, long day, depressed with the inevitable
reaction from the excitement of the past hours, they moved away, to the
south, to the west. In front of them, glittering in the moonlight,
seemingly infinite, stretched the waves of the rolling prairie, bare as
the sea in a calm. Behind them, growing lesser and lesser minute by
minute, merging into the infinite white, were three black dots like tiny
boats on the horizon's edge. On they went, a half mile, a mile, looked
behind; and, with an awe no familiarity could prevent, faced ahead anew.
Back of them now as well as before, uniformly endless, uniformly
magnificent, stretched that giant ocean: silent, serene, as mother
nature, as nature's master, God himself.




CHAPTER IV


RECONSTRUCTION

The day of the Indian terror had passed. No longer did the name of
Little Crow carry stampede in its wake. The battles of Big Mound, of
White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere
history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run. Still in
the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited massacre of Custer at the
Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse,