Vanguards of the Plains: A Romance of the Old Santa Fé TrailMcCarter, Margaret Hill
History
Vanguards of the Plains: A Romance of the Old Santa Fé Trail
McCarter, Margaret Hill
Santa Fe National Historic Trail -- Fiction; West (U.S.) -- History -- Fiction
I cannot follow with my pen the long marches of that campaign, and there
was no honorable nor glorious warfare in it. It is a story of
skirmishes, not of battles; of attack and repulse; of ambush and pursuit
and retreat. It is a story of long days under burning skies, by whose
fierce glare our brains seemed shriveling up and the world went black
before our heat-bleared eyes. A story of hard night-rides, when weary
bodies fought with watchful minds the grim struggle that drowsiness can
wage, though sleep, we knew, meant death. It is a story of fevered
limbs and bursting pulse in hospitals whose walls were prairie
distances. A story of hunger, and exhausted rations; of choking thirst,
with only alkali water mocking at us. And never could the story all be
told. There is no rest for cavalrymen in the field. We did not suffer
heavy loss, but here and there our comrades fell, by ones, and twos, at
duty's post; and where they fell they lie, in wayside graves, waiting
for glorious mention until the last reveille shall sound above the
battlements of heaven.
And I was one among these vanguards of the plains, making the old Santa
Fé Trail safe for the feet of trade; and the wide Kansas prairies safe
for homes, and happiness, and hope, and power. I lived the life, and
toughened in its grind. But in my dreams sometimes my other life
returned to me, and a sweet face, with a cloud of golden hair, and dark
eyes looking into mine, came like a benediction to me. Another face came
sometimes now--black, big, and glistening, with eyes of strange, far
vision looking at me, and I heard, over and over, the words of Esmond
Clarenden's cook:
"If you get into trouble, Mr. Bev, I'll come, hot streaks, to help you."
But trouble never stuck to "Mr. Bev," because he failed to know it when
it came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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