City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was from the Boise papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles
away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a
dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every
southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared
to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but
filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice
in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out
over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin
in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from
Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before
the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly,
but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body
was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.
They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a
candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in
the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once
a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise
_Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_
came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the
editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."
XIV
The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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