* * * * * But the savage justice of the tribesmen was done in such fashion as only these fiends of the lower border could have devised. No pen should specify as to this. For a time, for five minutes perhaps, or more, there came from the thicket shrieks of a man in torture, such sounds as left these hardened men unable to look one another in the face, though not one of them wavered in his own savage decision. Now it was too late. The word of the white men had been given. No smoke, no sign of fire arose above the top of the little thicket. There was no sound but that of the shrieking victim. The Comanches had devised some new way of punishment. Yellow Hand came back after a long time, a smile contorting his great mouth. “Him run little way,” said he, wiping his hands on his leggings. “No skin on him—he can’t run far.” And for reason of that which had gone on in yonder thicket by the little stream—by reason of what one time was found flung across the bush tops there—that bloody stream came to be called the Rawhide. The Comanche reservation, thus purchased, later established, was close to that spot. Far to the west, above Doan’s Crossing, over the high country where soon a dozen trails were to blend—seeking Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge, Great Bend, Ogalalla, all the Army posts and all the empty upper range—the Comanches fought no more. * * * * * The day of the northbound hegira of the cows had come. The immortal gods, trickling through their fingers grasses of grama, mesquite, redtop, buffalo, bluestem, watched a new land spring lustily into being. It was born of blood. But it was born of South and North, which never again were to know war one with the other. Both shared in sending old customs to a new land. A new language came to it. New industries grew in it. More rapidly than any tract of all our country or of any country ever was settled, the Great West of America became great and strong indeed. It wrote its story—whose beginnings almost have faded now—on the pages of the world’s history; or more splendidly still, on the lips of a country’s envying tradition of Homeric deeds. CHAPTER XLVIII THE GREAT LODESTONE IT WAS morning of an autumn day on the old rancho of Laguna de Sol. Although flowers lacked, the leaves of the live oaks held their perennial course unchanged, the heavy pendants of the Spanish moss aiding them against the rays of a sun still ardent. The air was almost without movement, too richly languorous for any exercise—sweet, rich, mellow and golden as honey, breath of a world caring for neither past nor future.