The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody tries to rob their new prosperity. In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches. Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few moments he was dead. But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood an example. Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,” he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men exchanged a sentence.” XIV A. D. 1845 THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke. Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or to leave his service.