"Let us thank God that in his ways, past finding out, He has not forsaken his children." Dr. Hemingway spoke fervently. I looked out on the broad street and down toward the river shining in the May sunlight. The air was very fresh and sweet. The oak trees, were in their heaviest green, and in the glorious light of day the commonest things in this little frontier town looked good to me. Across my vision there swept the picture of that wide, swift-flowing Verdigris River, and of the dead whose blood stained darkly that fatal sand-bar, their naked bodies hacked by savage fury, waiting the coming of pitiful hands to give them shelter in the bosom of the earth. And then I thought of all these beautiful prairies which the plough was beginning to subdue, of the homesteads whose chimney smoke I had seen many a morning from my windows up on Cliff Street. I thought of the little towns and unprotected villages, and of what an Indian raid would mean to these,--of murdered men and burning houses, and women dragged away into a slavery too awful to picture. I thought of Marjie and of what she had escaped. And then clear, as if he were beside me, I heard O'mie's voice: "Phil, oh, Phil, come, come!" it pleaded. I started up and stared around me. CHAPTER IX THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSING Also Time runnin' into years-- A thousand Places left be'ind; An' Men from both two 'emispheres Discussin' things of every kind; So much more near than I 'ad known, So much more great than I 'ad guessed-- An' me, like all the rest, alone, But reachin' out to all the rest! --KIPLING. "Uncle Cam, where is O'mie? I haven't seen him yet," I broke in upon the older men in the council. "Could anything have happened to him?" The priest rose hurriedly. "I have been hoping to see him every minute," he said. "Has anybody seen him this morning?" A flurry followed. Everybody thought he had seen somebody else who had been with O'mie, but nobody, first hand, could report of him. "Why, I thought he was with the boys," Cam Gentry exclaimed. "Nobody could keep track of nobody else last night." "I thought I saw him this morning," said Dr. Hemingway. "But"--hesitatingly--"I do not believe I did either. I just had him in mind as I watched Henry Anderson's boys go by." "All three of us are not equal to one O'mie," Clayton Anderson declared. "What part of town did he have, Philip?" asked Le Claire. "No part," I answered. "We had to take the boys that were out there under the oak." Dr. Hemingway called a council at once, and all who knew anything of the missing boy reported. I could give what had been told to Aunt Candace and myself only in a general way, in order to shield Tell Mapleson. Cam had seen O'mie only a minute, just before midnight.