"What you do with that?" She pointed at the flowers in his rough hand.

"I'm going to put 'em on your mother's grave."

"She not know. Not see, not smell. She dead, mother dead."

"Lahoma, do you know anything about God?"

"Yes--Great Spirit. God make my path white."

"Well, I want God to know that somebody remembers your mother. It's God that smells the flowers on the graves of the dead."

They walked on. Pretty soon Lahoma began looking about for flowers, but they had reached the last barren ledge, and no more came in sight.

"Take these, Lahoma."

"No. Couldn't fool God." They began the last descent. Willock suddenly discovered that tears were slipping down the girl's face. He said nothing; he did not fear, now, for he thought the tears promised a brighter dawning.

Suddenly Lahoma cried joyfully, "Oh, look, Brick, look!" And she darted toward the spot at the foot of a tall cedar, where purple and white blossoms showed in profusion. She gathered an armful, and they went down to the plain.

"Her head's toward the west," he said, as they stood beside the pile of stones. Lahoma placed the flowers at the Western margin of the pyramid. Willock laid his at the foot of the grave. The sun had set and the warmth of the heated sand was tempered by a fragrant breeze. Though late in October, he felt as if spring were just dawning. He took Lahoma's hand, and his heart throbbed to find that she showed no disposition to draw away.

He looked up with a great sigh of thanksgiving. "Well, God," he said softly, "here she is--You sure done it!"

CHAPTER VIII GETTING CIVILIZED

During the two years passed by Brick Willock in dreary solitude, conditions about him had changed. The hardships of pioneer life which, fifty years ago, had obtained in the Middle States yet prevailed, in 1882, in the tract of land claimed by Texas under the name of Greer County; but the dangers of pioneer life were greatly lessened. As Lahoma made the acquaintance of the mountain-range, and explored the plain extending beyond the natural horseshoe, Willock believed she ran little danger from Indians. He, himself, had ceased to preserve his unrelaxing watchfulness; after all, it had been the highwaymen rather than the red men whom he had most feared--and after two years it did not seem likely that such volatile men would pre serve the feeling of vengeance.

With the wisdom derived from his experience with wild natures, he carefully abstained from any attempt to force Lahoma's friendship, hence it was not long before he obtained it without reserve. As she walked beside him, grave and alert, she no longer thought of his bushy beard and prodigious mop of harsh hair; and the daily exhibition of his strength caused him to grow handsome in her eyes because most of those feats were performed for her comfort or pleasure. In the meantime he talked incessantly, and to his admiration, he presently found her manner of speech wonderfully like his own, both fluent and ungrammatical.

He knew nothing of grammar, to be sure, but there were times when his mistakes, echoed from her lips, struck upon his ear, and though he might not always know how to correct them, he was prompt to suggest changes, testing each, as a natural musician judges music, by ear. Dissatisfied with his own standards, he was all the more impatient to depart on the expedition after mental tools, despite the dangers that might beset the journey.

His first task prompted by the coming of Lahoma, had been to partition off the half of the dugout containing the stove for the child's private chamber. Cedar posts set in the ground and plastered with mud higher than his head, left a space between the top and the apex of the ceiling that the temperature might be equalized in both rooms. Thus far, however, they did not stay in the dugout except long enough to eat and sleep, for the autumn had continued delightful, and the cove seemed to the child her home, of which the dugout was a sort of cellar. Concerning the stone retreat in the crevice she knew nothing. Willock did not know why he kept the secret, since he trusted Lahoma with all his treasures, but the unreasoning reticence of the man of great loneliness still rested on him. Some day, he would tell--but not just yet.

"Lahoma," he said one day, "there's a settler over yonder in the mountains across the south plain. How'd you like to pay him a visit?"

"I don't want anybody but you," said Lahoma promptly.

Willock stood on one leg, rubbing the other meditatively with his delighted foot. Not the quiver of a muscle, however, revealed the fact that her words had flooded his heart with sunshine. "Well, honey, that's in reason. But I've got to take you with me after books and winter supplies, and I don't like the idea of traveling alone. It come to me that I might get Mr. Settler to go, too. Time was not so long ago when Injun bands was coming and going, and although old Greer is beginning to be sprinkled up with settlers, here and there, I can't get over the feel of the old times. They ain't no sensation as sticks by a man when he's come to be wedged in between forty-five and fifty, as the feel of the old times."

"Well," said Lahoma earnestly, "I wish you'd leave me here when you go after them books. I don't want to be with no strangers, I want to just squat right here and bear myself company."

"That's in reason. But, honey, while you might be safe enough whilst bearing the same, I would be plumb crazy worrying about you. I might not have good cause for worrying, but worrying--it ain't no bird that spreads its wings and goes north when cold weather comes; worrying--it's independent of causes and seasons."

"If you have got to be stayed with to keep you from worrying, they ain't nothing more to be said."

"Just so. That there old settler, I have crossed a few words with him, and I believe he would do noble to travel with. He's as gruff and growly as a grizzly bear if you say a word to him, and if he'll just turn all that temper he's vented on me on to any strangers we may run up against on the trail, he'll do invaluable."

"I'll go catch up the pony," said Lahoma briefly, "for I see the thing is to be did. This will be the first visit I ever made in my life when I wasn't drug by the Injuns."

"You mustn't say 'drug,' honey, unless specifying medicines and herbs. I ain't saying you didn't get it from me, and knowing you do get from me all I got, is what makes me hone for them books. You must say 'dragged.' The Injuns DRAGGED you from one village to another." He paused meditatively, muttering the word to himself, while Lahoma ran away to catch the pony. When she came back, leading it by the mane, he said, "I've been a-weighing that word, Lahoma, and it don't seem to me that 'dragged' sounds proper. It don't seem no sort of word to use in a parlor. What do you think? DRAGGED! How does that strike you?"

"I don't like the sound of it, neither," said Lahoma, shaking her head. "I think DRUG is softer. It kinder melts in the ear, and DRAGGED sticks."

"Well, don't use neither one till I can find out." Presently he was swinging along across the plain toward the southwestern range while the girl kept close beside him on the pony. Their talk was incessant, voicing the soul of good comradeship, and but for the difference between heavy bass and fluty soprano, a listener might have supposed himself overhearing a conversation between two Brick Willocks.

There was nothing about the second range of the Wichita Mountains to distinguish it from the one farthest toward the northeast except a precipice at its extremity, rising a sheer three or four hundred feet above the level plain. Beyond this lofty termination, the mountain curved inward, leaving a wide grassy cove open toward the south; and within this half-circle was the settler's dugout.

The unprotected aspect of that little home was in itself an eloquent commentary on the wonderful changes that had come about during the last seventeen years. The oval tract of one million five hundred thousand acres lying between Red River and its fork, named Greer County, and claimed by Texas, was in miniature a reproduction of the early history of America. Until 1860 it had not even borne a name, and since then it had possessed no settled abodes. Here bands of Indians of various tribes had come and gone at will, and here the Indians of the Plains, after horrible deeds of depredation, massacre and reprisal, had found shelter among its mountains. The country lay at the southwest corner of Indian Territory for which the Indians had exchanged their lands in other parts of the United States on the guarantee that the government would "forever secure to them and their heirs the country so exchanged with them."

At the close of the Civil War the unhappy Indians long continued in a state of smoldering animosity, or warlike activity, tribe against tribe, band against band; they had inherited the rancor and bitterness of the White Man's war with neither the fruits of victory nor the dignity that attends honorable defeat. The reservations that belonged originally to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek tribes, were reduced in area to make room for new tribes from Kansas, Colorado and other states, and the Indian wars resulted. For a time the scalp-knife was crimsoned, the stake was charred, bands stole in single file over mountains and among half-dried streams; troups of the regular army were assaulted by invisible foes, and forts were threatened. Youths who read romances of a hundred years ago dealing with the sudden war-cry, the flaming cabin, the stealthy approach of swarming savages, need have traveled only a few hundred miles to witness on the open page of life what seemed to them, in their long-settled states, fables of a dead past.

But though the Indian wars in the Territory had been bloody and vindictive, they had not been protracted as in the old days. Around the country of the red man was drawn closer and more securely, day