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with you once and for all! I'll find the an Irish characteristic under such circumother to-morrow."

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That night Lee made a speech at the quarry. The men listened placidly. Dyce, amazed that he was not discharged, went back to nurse Sawyer, a thoroughly cowed man. Noonan, Farrely, and Phelan retired to their shanty and got fighting drunk to the health of the "colleen wid' the gun; the rest of the men went away with wholecome convictions concerning their Superintendent that promised better things.

"Didn't fire Dyce-no, he didn't," was the whispered comment.

Lee's policy had done it's work.

As for the murderous mover of the plot, the plausible foreman, Finn, he had shown the white feather under fire and he knew the men might kill him on sight.

It's

stances.

Lee walked back from the quarry, realizing his triumph, recognizing that he owed it neither to his foolhardy impulse, nor yet to his mercy to Dyce and Sawyer. He went to the house and knocked at Helen's door. She was not there. He sat alone in his office, absently playing with pen and ruler until the June moon rose over the ocean and yellow sparkles flashed among the waves. An hour later he went to the dock, and found her sitting there alone in the moonlight.

She did not repulse him. Her innocent hour had come and she knew it, for she had read such things in romance. It came. But she was too much in love, too sincere, to use a setting so dramatic. She told him she loved him; she told him why she had come to the Porte-of-Waves, why she had remembered the kiss and the promise. She rested her head on his shoulder and looked out at the moon, smaller and more silvery now. She was contented.

Under the dock the dark waves lapped musically. Under the dock Finn, stripped to the skin, plunged silently downward for the last cash-box, trusting to sense of touch to find the safe.

But what he found was too horrible for words.

"Hark," whispered Helen; "did you hear something splash?"

Lee looked out into the moonlight; a shadow, a black triangular fin, cut the silvery surface, steered hither and thither circled, sheered seaward, and was lost. Then came another splash, far out among the waves.

"The Collector of the Porte," said Lee; "he is making merry in the moonlight."

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OUT

AN APPRECIATION OF THE WEST.

APROPOS OF THE OMAHA EXPOSITION.

BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE,

Author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" "The Real Issue," and the Boyville Stories.

UT West, beyond the Mississippi, in the open country where men grew famous fighting Indians a generation ago, there is a modern civilization. Wanting a better term, we call this civilization Anglo-Saxon. Democracy built it, and it is holding a festival in a bend of the Missouri, just outside of Omaha. A few hundred acres of land are covered with gay architecture. There is a lagoon half a mile long. In its water perhaps half a score of festive white staff buildings are reflected. Near by are the State buildings, constructed in varying tastes from tolerable to very bad; and then, of course, there is the Midway; there is an Indian camping ground, whereon a thousand Indians, of "every kindred, every tribe," from Alaska to Florida, are quartered. There are the pens and the stalls for a live-stock show and the incorporeal hereditaments thereunto ap

pertaining. Of course the Trans-Mississippi Exposition is not so magnificent as the World's Fair at Chicago. And yet the halfmile vista down the lagoon at the TransMississippi Exposition discloses nearly perfect examples of staff architecture. Nothing at Chicago surpassed it as a picture. Several million dollars have been expended. Private and corporate capital has helped the national government to make this show in a small measure worthy of the civilization which produced it. So, the ideals of the promoters of the Exposition were set high. For this is no new civilization, this civilization of the new western country. conceived thousands of years ago. Its leaven was working among men when Ariovistus crossed the Rhine and fought with Cæsar. Perhaps the germs of the force which bound the Helvetians together lives in the soul of

It was

the Anglo-Saxon to-day. Some sentient power has wrought a marvelous change in the prairie lands in the span of years that measures a man's life. Where the Indian's council-fires burned in the days of Jackson, the Caucasian's dream of beauty has found a fleeting shape in the white city that rises out on the plains to-day.

But

At night, twenty thousand electric lights paint a scene from fairyland upon the waters of the lagoon. The temples that stand there are erected to appease the gods of the latter days, the gods of machinery, electricity, the liberal arts, and all their kith and kin. What name that power shall take which has wrought this wonder; whether man shall worship the sentient force as Democracy, Destiny, or God, is a theme for philosophers to discuss and to settle if they can. with the manifestations of its works before him, no one can deny the presence here of something wise and mighty. At the very least the miracle of this Omaha Exposition, rising in what but yesterday seemed one of the earth's waste places, should strengthen the faith of Anglo-Saxons in the potency of their race and its institutions, even as the apostles of the Christ were filled with faith, seeing the signs and wonders of old.

This civilization is not crumbling. Popular education has crystallized the mortar in this edifice which Democracy is building. It is a house built upon a rock. The child of the farmer has the same number of years' schooling, and exactly the same schooling, that the banker's child has. The two youths start in life with equal opportunities. When the recent call came from the President for volunteers for the army, every man who offered to enlist in one western State could read and write. Democracy builds the schoolhouse, and the school-house perpetuates Democracy. Fifty cents of every dollar paid by the citizens of the West in direct taxation goes to maintain schools. The other half-dollar is divided into little piles to promote the general welfare in other departments of government. Monarchies, principalities, and powers tax their citizens to the verge of revolution, and prime ministers are proud if the King's treasure is large enough to buy guns and iron ships and drilled men and powder and lead to hold an armed peace and avert famine in a land civilized for centuries, flowing with milk and honey. Democracy buys a blackboard and a hickory pointer, and hires a soft-voiced girl to handle them. With these arms and accoutrements, Democracy goes into the camp

of the savage and establishes peace and proclaims a feast in the midst of a land lately taken from the desert. And the schoolhouse is the holy of holies whence the high priest of Democracy shall come, clad in the habiliments of grace and power, to work the marvels and to fulfil the prophecy made to mankind by this prairie vision of Omaha.

Every June leaves the standard of popular intelligence higher than the preceding September found it. This Trans-Mississippi is a growing country in more ways than one. And this quickening is not directed chiefly toward material things. Something more than a " building boom" has made this West. The school-house is not a commercial temple. It is turning men's minds toward "reason and the will of God." It is the sign by which Democracy shall conquer.

Scholars who have spent much time in research say that 350 years ago Coronado came up from Mexico through this TransMississippi land, looking for gold, as behooved a good Spaniard. The scholars say that he halted in central Kansas, on one of three hillocks at the junction of the Kansas and the Blue River. Agents of the Smithsonian Institution have located the exact spot where Coronado planted the great wooden cross and took possession of all the land for the King of Spain. It is on a rise of ground that overlooks to-day a peaceful, prosperous valley. The cross has been mold these three centuries. Democracy was attracted, as perhaps the Spaniard was attracted, by the thrilling beauty of the scene. And near the spot where Spain's cross stood, Democracy has put its emblem, the little, low, white school-house with green blinds. onado and his men were a greedy pack, looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola. They were blinded by their lust for gold, and they juggled with the cross. The love of gold was not strong enough to break down this wilderness. They who came three centuries later and brought the school-house, came "to make the West the homestead of the free," came to put His word Who sanctified the cross into the legal conscience of the people. The lagoon at Omaha is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual beauty of that high endeavor.

Cor

Therefore the dweller in the Trans-Mississippi country should keep ever in mind the image of what might have been if Spain had not ceded Louisiana to France. That image might inspire the American heart to the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. For the Spanish idea, that indefinable

principle that governs the course of nations in this festival, now holding in the heart of of the Spanish race, is a worm in the bud. what might have been New Spain, there is Under Spanish rule, or following even in a not one thing in all the show to remind the remote parallel the way of Spanish peoples, visitor to the Exposition of western Amerwhat a wretched destiny would have been ican history in that three hundred years. waiting for this generation of men in the The utter annihilation of everything Spanish Mississippi Basin! In the fertile angles of in all the West seems almost sad. In the the streams the placita would huddle about new world's mind, Spain's pioneers, who some imposing pile of mud, the home of the tramped so valiantly across the swamps, the grandee. Peons would roam the barren hills prairies, the desert, and the mountains, seekfollowing their flocks. The rich valleys ing the Seven Cities of Gold, are of less conprobably would be left to the blue-stem. If sequence than the black leaders of the warby chance some farmer, braver than his boys in the Matabeleland. Cabeça de Vaca kinsmen, should for a time disturb the sod, was a great explorer, but the fair-skinned the gay sunflower would soon spring up to people have forgotten him. In all the miles mock the folly of his daring. The ox and of rolling prairie which furnishes the wealth the ass, trudging over rutty, unkempt roads, that has produced this stirring spectacle on would set pace for the traffic in the land, the Missouri not one ruin, not one mound is and the sun-dial would mark the passing of there to mark the resting place of the men the "impracticable hours." Superstition, who ruled the land for fifteen score of years. bereft of all that was noble in the symbolism Only in the mountain States is the Spaniard's of the Aztec rites, yet clinging to many grave kept green. And there is a tragedy Aztec absurdities and holding tightly to the in the slow, inevitable decay of the Spanish most fantastic delusions of the dark ages, principle; for, beside it, making an unavoidwould bind a people to paganism who boasted able contrast, is the virile growth of the of their Christianity. Instead of the splen- Anglo-Saxon. It has been gradual-this did monuments to agriculture, to the applied Spanish decay; and down there in the southsciences, to the arts, and to the unknown ern mountain States, where four centuries goddess Beauty, which stand at Omaha to- have passed as quietly as they do in tombs, day the Mecca of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims; one may look down the corridors of time and under the influence of Spain, barbaric pro- see the Spaniard passing, see him dying by cessions would file out of adobe cathedrals inches after all, a melancholy sight, for he in the dry seasons and would duck holy images in adjacent creeks, chanting the while modified supplications of the sun-worshipers for rain. The Spanish idea seems to have lethargy for its principle. It is sleepy, but not dreamy enough to be poetic. Here in this western land, a people thralled by the Spanish hypnosis would not be ambitious enough to grow, yet they would be too favorably situated to die. Even a vagrant fancy sketch of what might have been if Napoleon had not taken Louisiana from the King of Spain should put every citizen of the West on his marrow bones in humble thanksgiving for the blessings he enjoys. II Anglo-Saxons were a pious race, like the Jews or the Arabs, they would put prayer rooms in the buildings at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and visitors would be called -very likely by the most worshipful schoolbell to retire an hour each day to meditate upon the good fortune which brought this mid-continental empire from the rule of the sons of Cæsar into the dominion of Ariovistus.

Spain held this Trans-Mississippi country for three centuries. How strange it is that

66

was a good fellow in his day, and served
God well. At Santa Fé, the capital of
Yankee Spain, there is an old bell hanging
in San Miguel church. The church has been
there 300 years, and the date upon the
bell says that it was moulded in Spain in
1356. On the bell crown are these words
in Latin: "Saint Joseph, pray for us."
That old bell should be brought North-alas!
brought as a captive-to the Trans-Missis-
sippi Exposition, to make an Anglo-Saxon
holiday. Saint Joseph, pray for us," rang
out the old bell before Columbus left Genoa.
"Saint Joseph, pray for us," it clanged as
Spain's glory rose with the second Philip and
sank with the Armada.
"Saint Joseph,
pray for us," sang the bell in its quaint
Latin tongue when the world's scholars
thought that the English language was a
jargon, and before Luther, the heretic,
swung the hammer that nailed the Theses to
the door to the time of the grand old hymn,
"Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott."
Joseph, pray for us," tinkled the bell as it
crossed the sea, to ring for the glory of
Spain and the preservation of the faith.
Saint Joseph, pray for us-pray for us,"

66

"Saint

sobbed the rusty voice in the lusty throat buildings in elevators, who in the decade of for poor Carlotta, the hapless, and for the seventies operated the business end of a Maximilian; and again, "Pray for us" it rifle against the aborigines. Red Cloud. wailed as the sea-birds brought the news of whose war-path lay but a night's ride in a the crumbling of the sunny land that had sleeper from Omaha, still lives. Sitting sent so many strong arms over the world to Bull and his braves lately terrorized the defend the ancient faith. And now the let- land where the Trans-Mississippi country ters, "Saint Joseph, pray for us," stare into will find its heartiest support. Spotted Tail the blue eyes of the Northerner, warning him and American Horse, chiefs of plains Into reflect upon the sparks that fly upward. dians, are heroes of but yesterday. And today the land over which they rode to glory knows them no more. The men who conquered the Cheyennes, the Shoshones, the Omahas, the Blackfeet, and the Crows fought this spring, hand to hand, knee to knee, eye to eye with the Philistines to prevent them from putting red paint on the white staff columns and arches and façades around the Court of Honor at Omaha.

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At Omaha, in the center of the festive scene, surrounded by the toys of modern science the electric fountain spouting its colored jets, the resistless motors, the laborsaving engines; in the shadow of the classic sanctuary made for the fine arts, this old mud church of San Miguel should stand, and its jangling bell should be heard sometimes above the blare of brass and of tinkling cymbals, with its "Saint Joseph, pray for us.' Perhaps we may need his prayers when the Slav shall find in our noblest achievement only the inspiration for a sigh. The managers of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition have given more attention to the North American Indian than they have given to the Spaniard. The Indian has left his mark all over the Mississippi Valley. He has named the rivers. He has christened many of the towns and most of the Western States. Doubtless Spain named all these rivers and valleys and high places, after her own heroes and according to her own ideals. Why did not Spain's names stick? Why did the Indian's meaningless and unmusical nomenclature impress things so deeply? Did he not have a vigor in his very death that commanded the white man's respect? Surely there must have been some good in the red man for so much to live after him. His spirit seems to hover over the Western land. Although the plow has scarred it and the railroad scratched it, and commerce has stripped the trees away that fringed its rivers, it is still the Indian country out here on the plains. At Omaha, where the bluffs of the Missouri mark their heavy brown lines on the northern horizon, and where the green of the upland stretches away into a glorious vista southward, there is a largeness and a savage freedom about the great curves and angles in the landscape that seem to give the Indian a natural right to ownership of the soil. Indeed, so lately did the Indian leave that the people of the new West still cherish traditions of the fighting days. Hundreds of well-dressed business men hurry through tiled corridors in Omaha, and scoot up and down the heights of brown-stone

It is only fair, therefore, that the Indian, who has played so important a part-even if it was a losing part-in the civilization of the new West, should have an important place in this Trans-Mississippi Exposition. It will be a kind of first inventory of stock on hand in the Louisiana Purchase, and it is gratifying to the lovers of poetic justice to find that the red man, who furnished the raw material for so much of the recent history of the Mississippi States, should have a place in the invoice-book. The Government of the United States has appropriated considerable money to bring the Indian to Omaha this summer. The Indian exhibit is one of the most interesting parts of the Exposition. By contrast, the exhibit of the savage makes the show of the civilized man more significant. The representatives from each of the existing tribes exemplify its manner of aboriginal life, its savage customs, its barbaric industries. Probably at no other place in the world will there be so admirable a living picture of the red man as this one at Omaha. A pitiable tragic accompaniment to this picture will be the serious exhibit made by the Indian schools of the United States. It shows the Indian trying vainly to make the jump of forty centuries from the chipped stone age to the day of the clearing-house, all in one wild hopeless leap. The Indian school exhibit prescribes the boundaries of the power of Democracy. It can work wonders with the men of the north countries of Europe. It can transform a wilderness into a State in the passing of a generation, using Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Teutons, or Slavs. But Democracy cannot civilize the Indian. In barren soil the mustard-seed dies. A man may not become a

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