The moon came up; the two cavalcades, scarcely a mile apart, moved on in unison together.  Then suddenly the dusky caravan seemed to arise, stretch itself out, and swept away like a morning mist towards the west.  The bugles of Fort Biggs had just rung out.

*****

Peter Atherly was up early the next morning pacing the veranda of the commandant’s house at Fort Biggs.  It had been his intention to visit the new Indian Reservation that day, but he had just received a letter announcing an unexpected visit from his sister, who wished to join him.  He had never told her the secret of their Indian paternity, as it had been revealed to him from the scornful lips of Gray Eagle a year ago; he knew her strangely excitable nature; besides, she was a wife now, and the secret would have to be shared with her husband.  When he himself had recovered from the shock of the revelation, two things had impressed themselves upon his reserved and gloomy nature:  a horror of his previous claim upon the Atherlys, and an infinite pity and sense of duty towards his own race.  He had devoted himself and his increasing wealth to this one object; it seemed to him at times almost providential that his position as a legislator, which he had accepted as a whim or fancy, should have given him this singular opportunity.

Yet it was not an easy task or an enviable position.  He was obliged to divorce himself from his political party as well as keep clear of the wild schemes of impractical enthusiasts, too practical “contractors,” and the still more helpless bigotry of Christian civilizers, who would have regenerated the Indian with a text which he did not understand and they were unable to illustrate by example.  He had expected the opposition of lawless frontiersmen and ignorant settlers—­as roughly indicated in the conversation already recorded; indeed he had felt it difficult to argue his humane theories under the smoking roof of a raided settler’s cabin, whose owner, however, had forgotten his own repeated provocations, or the trespass of which he was proud.  But Atherly’s unaffected and unobtrusive zeal, his fixity of purpose, his undoubted courage, his self-abnegation, and above all the gentle melancholy and half-philosophical wisdom of this new missionary, won him the respect and assistance of even the most callous or the most skeptical of officials.  The Secretary of the Interior had given him carte blanche; the President trusted him, and it was said had granted him extraordinary powers.  Oddly enough it was only his own Californian constituency, who had once laughed at what they deemed his early aristocratic pretensions, who now found fault with his democratic philanthropy.  That a man who had been so well received in England—­the news of his visit to Ashley Grange had been duly recorded—­should sink so low as “to take up with the Injins” of his own country galled their republican pride.  A few of his personal friends regretted that he had not brought back from England more conservative and fashionable graces, and had not improved his opportunities.  Unfortunately there was no essentially English policy of trusting aborigines that they knew of.