bitterness of the White Man's war with neither the fruits of victory
nor the dignity that attends honorable defeat. The reservations
that belonged originally to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw,
Seminole and Creek tribes, were reduced in area to make room for new
tribes from Kansas, Colorado and other states, and the Indian wars
resulted. For a time the scalp-knife was crimsoned, the stake was
charred, bands stole in single file over mountains and among
half-dried streams; troups of the regular army were assaulted by
invisible foes, and forts were threatened. Youths who read romances
of a hundred years ago dealing with the sudden war-cry, the flaming
cabin, the stealthy approach of swarming savages, need have traveled
only a few hundred miles to witness on the open page of life what
seemed to them, in their long-settled states, fables of a dead past.

But though the Indian wars in the Territory had been bloody and
vindictive, they had not been protracted as in the old days. Around
the country of the red man was drawn closer and more securely, day
by day, the girdle of civilization. Within its constricting grasp
the spirit of savagery, if not crushed, was at least subdued.
Tribes naked but for their blankets, unadorned save by the tattoo,
found themselves pressed close to other tribes which, already
civilized, had relinquished the chase for agricultural pursuits.
Primeval men, breathing this quickened atmosphere of modernity,
either grew more sophisticated, or perished like wild flowers
brought too near the heat. It is true the plains were still
unoccupied, but they had been captured--for the railroad had come,
and the buffalo had vanished.

Brick Willock and the man he had come to see were very good types
of the first settlers of the new country--one a highwayman, hiding