CHAPTER XXIV.
THE WHOA-HAW TRAIL There are no pleasures where women are not.
-- Marie de Romba.
How shall I tell of those stirring times in such way that readers who live in later and different days may catch in full their flavor?
How shall I write now so that at a later time men may read of the way America was taken, may see what America then was and now is, and what yet, please God! it may be?
How shall be set down that keen zest of a nation's youth, full of ambition and daring, full of contempt for obstacles, full of a vast and splendid hope?
How shall be made plain also that other and stronger thing which so many of those days have mentioned to me, half in reticence--that feeling that, after all, this fever of the blood, this imperious insistence upon new lands, had under it something more than human selfishness?
I say I wish that some tongue or brush or pen might tell the story of our people at that time.

Once I saw it in part told in color and line, in a painting done by a master hand, almost one fit to record the spirit of that day, although it wrought in this instance with another and yet earlier time.

In this old canvas, depicting an early Teutonic tribal wandering, appeared some scores of human figures, men and women half savage in their look, clad in skins, with fillets of hide for head covering; men whose beards were strong and large, whose limbs, wrapped loose in hides, were strong and large; women, strong and large, who bore burdens on their backs.

Yet in the faces of all these there shone, not savagery alone, but intelligence and resolution.

With them were flocks and herds and beasts of burden and carts of rude build; and beside these traveled children.