Gaunt looked up at the immense expanse of unoccupied sky above them. "She isn't likely to meet another of her species of any nationality," he said reflectively.

"Couldn't we go for a little jazz before it's dark, sir?" urged McHenry persuasively.

But Gaunt shook his head. "Wait a minute," he said. He had seated himself on the top step of the little veranda and was gazing out absently over the fast darkening prairie.

Kilgour spoke up eagerly. "Of course you'll go! I say, what a lark, Gaunt! Why it's the first aeroplane that's ever struck this part of the world!"

The captain turned his head slowly and looked at Kilgour.

"It is," he said and there was a sudden, queer thrill in his voice. "Don't say a word, Kilgour! I've got an idea." He looked at McHenry. "Cover this Thing up. Stay right here and don't so much as let any one look at her. When it's quite dark you and your boys roll her into that big barn over there. Then come to me here. I shall want to speak to you." He laid a hand that shook with excitement on Kilgour's shoulder. "We've got two weeks to work in! Come into my study," he said, "and I'll tell you how we'll stop the Sun Dance!"

There was consternation on the Blood reserve and among the Indians for fifty miles around. Strange things had happened, were happening every nightthings that could only be whispered about during the day, for, since the night of the great council, when the awful portent had first been seen by the terrified Bloods, it was impossible to get any but a few of the bravest spirits together after dark. Indian runners from the north and west who had invaded the reserve so fearlessly before, now skulked up in the afternoon or by the cheerful morning light and were promptly pounced upon and sent away by Kilgour's men. But they argued that even Kilgour's anger was far better than a sight of the fearful Thing.

Reports varied as to just what it was, but the terror was unanimous. It had been seen first on the night when they had gathered in council, and, fired by the

hot speeches of the young bucks, had decided to hold the Sun Dance in defiance of the White Father's orders. Dissension and fear were universal but the latter was quickly overcoming the former. On the morning of the tenth day Kilgour despatched a note to Gaunt.

"You had better come over," he wrote. "Something's going to happen-I can feel it. You and McHenry have turned the trick. They're all in a beautiful, blooming fright. "KILGOUR."

The afternoon found Gaunt seated in Kilgour's den, smoking Kilgour's cigars and listening to Kilgour's enthusiastic recital of the progress of affairs.

"I say, Gaunt, it's worked like a charm

"How!" said a shaking voice at the window.

Both men started and looked around. Red Crow Tail sat on the veranda just outside the study window. He was smoking an old pipe and trying to look unconcerned.

Another head rose beside his, crowned with an eagle feather set in a bone socket from which dangled backward an antelope's foot.

"How!" The throaty voice was most affable.

"How!" said Kilgour and then he laughed excitedly and looked over at Gaunt. "It's come!" he said.

A dozen pair of eyes were peering in at the window now and the two officers could hear the muffled patter of moccasined feet that trailed cautiously up the veranda steps.

Red Crow Tail stuck his pipe in his pouch and shifted an uneasy foot.

"We are come, my brothers and I," he swept a comprehensive hand toward the thronged veranda, "to know if the great White Man is angry with us? There are Things," his voice sank to an awed whisper, "there are Things we do not understand."

Kilgour leaned forward.

"What is this?" he demanded severely. "Strange signs are seen," piped an anxious voice from near the window. “A Ghost-Bird that flies by night in a cloud of fire with a great humming."

Kilgour looked at Gaunt. "Phosphorus on the wings and tail," whispered the captain.

"It bellowed like a calf at branding time when Yellow Wolf and I fled from it down by the big coulée." The voice came in frightened remonstrance from a big buck who stood by the window ready to flee again in case of accident.

"McHenry and I had the happy idea of adding a klaxon horn to the 'Hawk's' equipment," murmured Gaunt under his breath. "We can let the 'Ghost-Bird' fly so low here that the horn can actually be heard above the noise of the motor. We did let it toot an awful blast when we saw old Yellow Wolf and Three Feathers."

"Yes," echoed a voice from the veranda, "I, too, heard and saw it-a bird bearing on its back the God of Thunder." "I wrap myself in a sheet and look quite imposing," elucidated Gaunt in suppressed tones.

Larger than the largest eagle, with a humming as of all the bees in the Indians' country, did it swim toward us from the mountain. Many times it circled the heavens, flapping its huge wings, then with a mournful cry it disappeared behind the moon," remarked a melancholy, poetical looking old chief who sat huddled up in the farthest corner of the room.

"Oh, I say, what an imagination the old chap's got! Fancy the 'Hawk' flapping her wings and disappearing behind the moon!" whispered Gaunt.

Kilgour looked interestedly around upon his court of inquiry.

"Has any one else among you seen this strange, this terrible Thing?"

A young buck pushed his way through the crowd at the window. "I, Buffalo Horn, have seen it," he said in a voice which he strove in vain to make steady. "It was a Ghost-Bird, as Red Eagle has said. It was large and white and flew in the air, sometimes high, sometimes low. It passed over me like a breath of the hot Chinook and climbed the cottonwood tree by Lost Creek."

"Oh, I say, Gaunt, Buffalo Horn must have been drinking sixikimmi schoonataps! Not even a 'Hawk No. 9' can climb a cottonwood-can she?" demanded Kilgour in a low tone.

VOL. LXVII.-8

"I'd bet on McHenry to make her do 'most anything," retorted Gaunt warmly.

"It was no bird," came a quaking voice from a dark corner. "A bird does not turn over and over and shoot downward from the sky, spinning like a ball of fire!" "McHenry's great on virages and nose dives, Kilgour," murmured Gaunt in a hasty aside.

"What dreadful thing is this?" demanded Kilgour. "You must have been drinking forbidden drinks, Little Wolf!" "I drank after, oh, son of the Great White Father, to forget-to forget!"

"I, too, saw it," volunteered a wickedlooking Indian with a brow-band of red and gorgeous shaps hung with ermine tails. "It had an eye that blazed like many camp-fires. It circled around my tepee many times and vanished with the cry of a loon."

"You bet we circled," observed Gaunt. "He's the wickedest one of your bunch, Kilgour, and we had to fix him."

An old chief gathered himself up from the floor and pointed tremblingly at Kilgour.

"Tell us, oh son of the Great White Father, what means this awful Thing? We are brave-our young men do not fear death or torture, but who is powerful against such evil omens?"

"And wherefore do you think it is an evil omen? Have you committed evil that such an omen should be sent you?” demanded Kilgour severely.

Many Feathers arose in a far corner of the room.

"We have," he said in a shaking voice. "Many times have I told them in the last ten suns that this Thing was come upon us because the Bloods were about to disobey the White Father-were-to hold the Sun Dance."

"What is this I hear?" thundered Kilgour in his sternest voice and with a very good imitation of surprise.

"It is so," corroborated the old chief with a nod toward Many Feathers. "But what are our young men to do?— are we not to have braves?"

Kilgour leaned back in his chair and frowned heavily.

"Ha! so this is the meaning of this fearful Thing! After my instructions to you-written and spoken to you through

the government's interpreter, you were about to disobey the law?"

"But what are we to do without young braves?" tremulously demanded Crow Tail from his position at the head of the line.

"Bah! to swing at the end of a lariat until your sinews burst! Is that the only way to make a brave? Does the white man do such things, and is he not brave? Have you not called us brave, yourselves? Do you not wish to be more civilized like your brothers to the south? Has the White Father sent us up into this far north country to help you, and all for nothing? Will he have to send still more angry portents before you obey?" A shudder ran through the room and the Indians huddled together like frightened children.

"It is as I said," murmured Many Feathers from his corner in a calamitous voice. Kilgour leaned forward and shook an impressive finger at the crouching, silent Indians.

"Go back to your hay-making and reaping and forget the bad thoughts in your hearts. Think not that I have not seen the evil brewing among you. But it was best that the White Father should speak to you himself."

"But-but," queried Crow Tail, "will all be well now? Will this Thing come by night among us again—?”

"Begone, I say!" interrupted Kilgour magnificently. "I will intercede for you -I and this son of the White Father who could punish you had he not compassion on your ignorance. Go, and if you obey and stay well within the reservation, I will answer that the Ghost-Bird will be seen no more."

"We promise," murmured the old chief, edging his way toward the window.

Hastily and joyously did they depart, the young bucks falling over each other in their efforts to get to their tethered pintos, the old chiefs and medicine-men. making off by twos and threes as fast as their trembling legs would permit. Not until Crow Tail and Buffalo Horn and Many Feathers had at last made their exit gracefully through the window did Kilgour dare look at the captain.

"By the holy powers, wasn't that a séance?" he demanded, and there was wonder and triumph and uncontrolled mirth in his voice. Gaunt was laughing so that the walls shook.

"If only official red-tape had permitted McHenry to have been here!" he managed to say. "Ride back to the detachment with me and we'll tell him the whole thing. It's a crime he couldn't have been in at the killin'. He's played the game to the limit."

"He has," assented Kilgour enthusiastically. "He's prevented a small Indian uprising and he deserves anything he wants.'

"There's nothin' too good for the Irish,"" sang Gaunt. "By the way, he probably feels that he has already been amply paid-he's had the greatest two weeks of his short, adventurous career, you can bet on that. Cunningham'll be wild with jealousy when he hears about it."

"Of course. Cunningham ought to have been here too."

"And the 'Hawk,"" added Gaunt. "I say, Gaunt, what'll you do about the 'Hawk' now? You can't exactly go flying about on a Ghost-Bird after this." "I've thought of that, my boy. She goes down to Edmonton with McHenry for a coat of blue paint on her fuselage and she stays down there for a week. Tomorrow you start for Regina and a conference with the powers that be, and you will return in a week with the comforting news that the Great White Father is sending a Blue-Bird of good omen which will fly by day as well as by night, and which will destroy the evil Ghost-Bird and protect the White Father's Indian subjects so long as they remain loyal and obedient. It's a neat idea, I think," added Gaunt with pardonable pride.

Kilgour went to the door and called his man.

"Some seltzer and Scotch," he said. Then he turned to Gaunt. "That's a good idea, all right, but somehow I hate to think of the 'Hawk' as anything but a beautiful, ghostly white. Let's drink to her as she is, and to McHenry, 'the god in the machine!""

SHE running title of these rambling essays is taken from two things that are common and useful on the ways of life, where you and I, gentle reader,

are still trudging on.

The guide-post is the progressive sign: it calls us to continue our journey, and gives information in regard to direction and distance, which (if correct) has considerable value to the traveller. The camp-fire is the conservative symbol: it invites to rest and fellowship and friendly council, not unmixed with that good cheer which is suggested when we call a conference of wits a symposium.

There is no escape from the fact that man's best discourse has always been at a common meal, whether spread on the green grass or on a mahogany table. Of the elders of Israel in the Exodus, it is recorded in a sacred book that "they saw God and did eat and drink.". This is a gentle hint that however soulful a man's soul may be, in his present mixed estate the body had its claims, which it is both lawful and necessary to satisfy, in order that the spiritual part may not be hampered and disordered. Hunger, thirst, and indigestion are alike unfavorable to clear thought and calm devotion.

Let me confess at the outset that by guide-posts and camp-fires I intend more than the literal meaning of the words. I use them for their significance, their symbolism.

Every social theory, every moral maxim, every appeal of preacher or political orator, every bit of propaganda printed or spoken, yes, even every advertisement in the newspapers or on the bill-boards, whether false or true, is of the nature of a guide-post.

Every place where men rest and repose with warmth to cheer them-the hollow in the woods where pilgrims or tramps gather about the blazing sticks, the snug cottage where the kettle simmers on the

hearth, the royal castle where an ancient coat-of-arms is carved on the mantelpiece, the vast palatial hotel where sovereign democracy flaunts its newfound wealth and commercial travellers bask in the heat of concealed steamradiators-every one of these is nothing more nor less than a camp-fire.

No human progress is unbroken and continuous. No human resting-place is permanent. Where are Pharaoh's Palace, and Solomon's Temple, and the House of Caesar, and Cicero's Tusculum, and Horace's Sabine farm? Nothing could be more absurd than the project of "founding a family" in America. If you should do it and come back after five or six generations to inspect the results, you might regret your temporary success. Yet I am a "Son of the Revolution" and look back with pride to my great-grandsire who died on the battle-field of Monmouth for the cause of liberty. What manner of man the stout old farmer was I know not. It is his deed, his spirit that commands my reverence. "Tout lasse, tout passe,"-except the ideal

"Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives."

I remember what General William Tecumseh Sherman-fine old campaignersaid to me when he first came to New York to live in his own house. "I've made a new camp. Plenty of wood and water. Drop in."

We might get more comfort out of this sane and wholesome philosophy of life, if it were not for the violent extremists of the Right and the Left, who revile and buffet us alternately when we try to push ahead and when we stop to think. I have good friends on both sides, but at times they treat me vilely as an enemy.

The trouble with the Radicals is that they are always scourging us to travel somewhither, anywhither, ignoring the

past, condemning the present, and hurling ourselves blindfold into the future. The trouble with the Conservatives is that they are always lulling us to stay where we are, to be content with our present comforts, and to look with optimistic eyes only on the bright side of our neighbors' discomforts. Neither pessimism nor optimism pleases me. I am a meliorist.

Therefore I refuse to engage in the metaphysical triangular conflict between the past, the present, and the future. It means nothing to me. Yesterday is a memory. To-morrow is a hope. Today is the fact. But tell me, would the fact be what it is without the memory and the hope? Are not all three equally real? I grant you there is a distinction between the actual and the imaginary. But it is not a difference in essence. It is only a difference in origin and form. What we call the actual has its origin in a fact outside of us. What we call the imaginary has its origin in a fact within us. A burned finger and a burning indignation are equally real. Memory is simply imagination looking back: hope, looking forward. The imaginary is not non-existent. It exists in the mind-the very same place where every perception through the senses has its present and only being.

When I was a boy I cut my left hand with my first pocket-knife. But the physical scar of that actual accident, now almost invisible, is less vivid than the memory of the failure of my ambition to become a great orator. In that collegiate contest, fifty years ago, the well-prepared phrase fled from my paralyzed brain,

"vox faucibus haesit,"

Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia and Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians." Few indeed are the native Americans you meet, struggling like yourself among the conflicting tides,"rari nantes in gurgite vasto."

think

Yet, even on such a walk, if you serenely you have a hope of something better in the long to-morrow: a modern city in which the curse of crowding shall be mitigated by wiser dispositions of traffic, transportation, and housing: a city in which there shall be room for homes and playgrounds, as for temples and courthouses: a city in which the rights of property shall be safeguarded chiefly as essential to the supreme right of life.

The memory, the fact, the hope, are equally real. But tell me, brother, can we really make sure of our guide-posts unless we take counsel together beside our camp-fires?

The secret of perpetual motion has not yet been discovered. Human nature demands intervals of rest and relaxation as the unexempt condition of our mortal frailty. Here is where I find my stance for a drive. Go forward we must, unless we are willing to slip backward. But we cannot know that we are going forward, without stopping to talk over our common concerns beside the camp-fire.

Good-humor is one of the pre-requisites of sound judgment. I have seen needful work done by men in excitement. and an ill temper, but never truth discovered nor creative things accomplished. My old gardener used to swear horribly

You remember, as of yesterday, those pleasant afternoon walks on Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to Central Park, in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, when the air was clean and bright, the sky-line low, and on every block you had greetings from good friends. Today, if duty compels, you plunge through that mile-and-a-half, shut in by manmade cliffs of varying degrees of ugliness, stifled by fumes of gasolene from the conglomerate motor-cars, and worming your way through malodorous or highly-perfumed throngs of "Parthians, Medes, and

when he was studying how to make flowers or vegetables grow better, he was in a friendly mood-whistling or singing.

Emerson has a good word on this. "Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and to make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason, that whoever sees the law which distributes things does not despond, but is ani