The Eagles Heart | Page 6

upon the facts and transmitted them instantly into something
vivid and dramatic. He assumed all leadership in the hunting, and upon
Jack fell all the drudgery. He always did the reading, also, while Harold
listened and dreamed with eyes that seemed to look across miles of
peaks. His was the eagle's heart; wild reaches allured him. Minute

beauties of garden or flower were not for him. The groves along the
river had long since lost their charm because he knew their limits--they
no longer appealed to his imagination.
A hundred times he said: "Come, let's go West and kill buffalo.
To-morrow we will see the snow on Pike's Peak." The wild country
was so near, its pressure day by day molded his mind. He had no care
or thought of cities or the East. He dreamed of the plains and horses
and herds of buffalo and troops of Indians filing down the distant
slopes. Every poem of the range, every word which carried flavor of
the wild country, every picture of a hunter remained in his mind.
The feel of a gun in his hands gave him the keenest delight, and to stalk
geese in a pond or crows in the cornfield enabled him to imagine the
joy of hunting the bear and the buffalo. He had the hunter's patience,
and was capable of creeping on his knees in the mud for hours in the
attempt to kill a duck. He could imitate almost all the birds and animals
he knew. His whistle would call the mother grouse to him. He could
stop the whooping of cranes in their steady flight, and his honking
deceived the wary geese. When complimented for his skill in hunting
he scornfully said:
"Oh, that's nothing. Anyone can kill small game; but buffaloes and
grizzlies--they are the boys."
During the winter of his sixteenth year a brother of Mr. Burns returned
from Kansas, which was then a strange and far-off land, and from him
Harold drew vast streams of talk. The boy was insatiate when the plains
were under discussion. From this veritable cattleman he secured many
new words. With great joy he listened while Mr. Burns spoke of
cinches, ropes, corrals, buttes, arroyos and other Spanish-Mexican
words which the boys had observed in their dime novels, but which
they had never before heard anyone use in common speech. Mr. Burns
alluded to an aparejo or an arroyo as casually as Jack would say
"singletree" or "furrow," and his stories brought the distant plains
country very near.
Harold sought opportunity to say: "Mr. Burns, take me back with you; I

wish you would."
The cattleman looked at him. "Can you ride a horse?"
Jack spoke up: "You bet he can, Uncle. He rode in the races."
Burns smiled as a king might upon a young knight seeking an errant.
"Well, if your folks don't object, when you get done with school, and
Jack's mother says he can come, you make a break for Abilene; we'll
see what I can do with you on the 'long trail.'"
Harold took this offer very seriously, much more so than Mr. Burns
intended he should do, although he was pleased with the boy.
Harold well knew that his father and mother would not consent, and
very naturally said nothing to them about his plan, but thereafter he laid
by every cent of money he could earn, until his thrift became a source
of comment. To Jack he talked for hours of the journey they were to
make. Jack, unimaginative and engrossed with his studies at the
seminary, took the whole matter very calmly. It seemed a long way off
at best, and his studies were pleasant and needed his whole mind.
Harold was thrown back upon the company of his sweetheart, who was
the only one else to whom he could talk freely.
Dot, indolent, smiling creature of cozy corners that she was, listened
without emotion, while Harold, with eyes ablaze, with visions of the
great, splendid plains, said: "I'm going West sure. I'm tired of school;
I'm going to Kansas, and I'm going to be a great cattle king in a few
years, Dot, and then I'll come back and get you, and we'll go live on the
banks of a big river, and we'll have plenty of horses, and go riding and
hunting antelope every day. How will you like that?"
Her unresponsiveness hurt him, and he said: "You don't seem to care
whether I go or not."
She turned and looked at him vacantly, still smiling, and he saw that
she had not heard a single word of his passionate speech. He sprang up,

hot with anger and pain.
"If you don't care to listen to me you needn't," he said, speaking
through his clinched teeth.
She smiled, showing