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Kansas University Weekly.
LITERARY.
The Tale of the Military Man.
Long years ago, a party of Mormons on their way westward, paused to rest in the quiet little valley of the Cherokee Hills, where the Cherokees assembled in the summers for their tribal councils. They made friends with the Indians, and being of a thrifty nature they took the contract for the construction of some brick buildings. They built them well, and to day the houses stand as solid as the day the honest workmen put aside their tools and resumed their westward journey. One of these houses, a large two story dwelling with wide porches and ample fireplaces, is now used as a hotel. In the winter evenings the guests of the house gather in the large office room, around the fireplace where a good fire is always burning, and the evening is generally passed in telling tales of days gone by but not forgotten. Nothing is more conducive to good stories than an open fire. Men were always coming and going at this queer old fashioned hostelry, and new stories could be heard every evening. There with the fire lighting up their weather-beaten faces, old Cherokees would tell of the ancient glories of their tribe and of its wrongs, of its lost Paradise in the beautiful South beyond the Great River; they told tales of Houston, that strange man who turned his back upon the men of his own race and came to dwell among the redmen, a chief and a warrior, and went away again and fought and won an empire and gave it to his country; stories they told of Sequoyah the wise man of the Cherokees, who traveled even to the big western sea, and who would sit silently thinking when the other young men fought and quarreled, and who, dying, left behind him an imperishable monument in the tribal alphabet. Men with the fire and strength of youth yet in them, told of the wild days when the white man's war toore the tribe asunder, and a score of fierce chieftains carried fire and death through the peaceful valleys and engendered feuds that live to this day. Now and then a white man
came and sat by the fire, and told of strange adventures that had befallen himself and comrades. Now and then a marshal, fresh from the fights with the Cook Gang then plundering right and left, told of hard rides and fierce fights.
One evening a white man drew his chair into the little circle about the fireplace, and smoked and listened as the others talked. He was tall and gray, handsome of face and with the manners of a gentleman. There was something in his bearing that told as plainly as spoken words that he had been a soldier and had "seen service." A story of the war on the border, told by one of Stanwaite's men, seemed to interest him more than any of the previous ones, and at its conclusion he gave his contribution to the evening's entertainment.
"During the late war, I was opposed to our friend here" he said, with a nod of his head to the ex-Confederate. When the war came on I enlisted in a Northern cavalry regiment. I was young and possessed much of the recklessness of youth. This seemed to find favor with my officers, for I was many times promoted,—only to be reduced again for what to me seemed but a trifling breach of the regulations. I managed however to check my heedlessness and reached the rank of second lieutenant. It was shortly after my promotion that the battalion to which I belonged was ordered to leave the comfortable quarters we had fixed up for the winter, and was sent on an expedition into a mountanious part of the country to break up a strong organization of bushwhackers that were making things unpleasant for Union sympathizers in that region. Our quarters were near a town large enough to have provided sufficient amusement through the winter to suit even a cavalry man, and consequently we rode away from them in anything but an amiable mood.
"For weeks we rode up and down the rough hills and mountains, pursuing that which always seemed in our grasp yet always eluded us. Always about us but never in sight, the