The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-04-14
CHAPTER w

place Tor the emigrants in the days before
the Union Pacific was built, when the over
land stage route followed the Platte to the
oweetwater, and then past the Devils Gate
and independence Rock-old landmarks of
the Mormons-and on to the backbone of
the continent, where the mountain
streams, springing from rocky beds not
long pistol-shot apart, flowed ripping
away, the one to the Missouri and the Gulf
of Mexico, the other to the Colorado and
that of California. Frayne was but huge
stOckade in the early days of the civil war,
but the Government found it important
from a strategical point of view, even after
the railway spanned the Rockies, and the
emigrant and settler no longer trudged
the weary trail that, bordering the Sioux
country, became speedily a road of fire and
blood, second only in its terrors to the
Smoky Hill route through bleeding Kan
saS." Once it was the boast of the Da-
kotas, as it has been for generations of
their enemies, the Absarakas, or Crows,
that they had never shed the blood of a
white man. Settlers of the old days used
to tell how the Sioux had followed them
for long, long marches, not to murder and
pillage, but to restore to them items lost
along the trail or animals strayed from
their little herds. But there came an end
TO all this when, resisting an unjust de-
mand, the Sioux, fired upon retaliated.
From the day of the Grattan massacre be-
yOnd old Laramie, there has been no real
peace with the lords of the Northwest
They are quiet only when subdued by
force. They have broken the crust of their
environment time and again, and burst
in hn Of
that is ever bubbling and boiling beneath
the feet of the frontiersman to this day.
And so Frayne was maintained as a mill
tary post for years; first as a stockade
then as a sub-depot of supplies, garrisoned
by four companies of infantry and four of
cavalry, the former to hold the fort, the
latter to scour the neighboring country.
Then as time wore on and other posts
were built further up in the Big Horn,
Frayne's garrison dwindled, but there
stood upon its commanding bluff the low
rows of wooden barracks. the parallel rows
. OF double sets of broad-piazzaed quarters
where dwelt the officers, the long, low,
log-riveted walls of the corrals and
cavalry stables on the fats below.
Here, oddly enough, the Twelfth had
spent a lively year or two before 1t
went to Arizona. Here it learned the
Sioux country and the Sioux so well that
when, few years back, the ghost dance
craze swept over the p1dlLS anu uOuuldlNS
like the plague the old regiment was hur-
Tied from its sunshiny stations in the
South and mustered once again, four troops
at least, within the very walls that long
before had echoed to its trumpets. Here
we found them IL the midst of the Christ
mas preparations that were turned so sud-
denly into summons to the field, and here
again, three years later still, headquarters
and six troops now, the proud old regiment
is still at Frayne, and Fenton, ''vice Far
Tar, killed in action with hostile Indians"
holds the command.
a good soldier is Fenton, brave fellow,
q trife rough at times, like the simple
plains-bred dragon he is, but gentle
man, with gentle heart In his breast for
all the stern exterior. Women said of him
that all he needed to make him perfect was
polish, and all he needed to give him polish
was wife, for at 81 the griZzled colonel
was bachelor. But Fenton had had his
romance in early youth. He had loved
with all his big heart, so said tradition. a
New York belle and beauty whom be knew
in his cadet days, and who so rumor said,
preferred another, whom she married be-
fore the war, and many a garrison belle
had since vainly set her cap for Fenton
and found him faithful TO his early love-
But though the ladies often speculated as
to the identity of the woman who had held
the ColOneps heart in bondage all these
years and blocked the way for all sue
cessors, no one of their number had ever
heard her name or even knew the truth
One officer there was in the Twelfth who,
like Fenton himself, was a confirmed bach
elor and who was said to be possessed of
the whole story, but there was no use ask
ing Malcolm Leale to tell anybody's Sc
cretS, and when Fenton came to Frayne,
promoted to the command so recently held
by man they all loved and honored, it
was patent to everybody that he felt sorely,
as though he was an usurper. Fenton was
many long miles away with another bat
talon of the Twelfth the day of the tragic
battle on the Mini Pusa, and it was long
months thereafter before he appeared at
regimental headquarters, and then he
brought with him as his housekeeper his
maiden sister, Lucretia, and IN Lucretia
Fenton-the dreamiest, dOwdiest, kindliest,
quaintest, middle-aged prattler that ever
lived, moved and had her being in the
'army-the ladies of the Twelfth found so
much to make merry over that they we'll
nigh forgot and forgave the unfattering
Indifference to feminine destinations of her
brother the colonel.
When Fenton came the Farrars, widowed
mother and devoted daughter, had been
gone some weeks. The shock of her hus-
bands death had well nigh shaken Mrs
Farrar's reason, and for months her con-
dition was indeed deplorable. Loving him
.devotedly, glorying in his soldlerly record
and reputation, yet ever dreading for him
just such an end, she had been so pros
trated by her grief that Ellis almost forgot
her own bitter sorrow in the contempla-
ton of her mothers woe. For months the
daughter was her main prop and COM
fort and attendant. VIII, her bright, brave
boy, could not be permitted to leave his
studies at the Point Royle, her first-born,
was an Outcast and wanderer she knew not
where. Ellis, her youngest, her one daugh-
ter, proved to be her chief dependence
Loving friends and relatives she had in
plenty, to be sure, and through the provi-
dence of her soldier husband, her fortune
was unimpaired, and, fortunately, more
than sufficient for her needs. And so, for
over six months after that fatal Christmas
tide. the widow lay, either apathetic or in
the depths of an overwhelming grief, and
Ellis never LETT her side. And then they
went for summer at the seashore, for
Ellis herself was dropping, and then while
visiting at her own sisters home Mrs.
Farrar began to realize how all this time
Ellis education was being neglected, and,
despite her protest, the girl was sent back
to school in New York, where she could
be within call. This was her one stipula-
ton, for Ellis well knew what her mother
only family suspected-that no more sud
den shocks could come into the gentle
sufferers life, without danger of ending it