LIONS OF THE LORD

FOREWORD

In the days of ’49 seven trails led from our Western frontier into theWonderland that lay far out under the setting sun and called to therestless. Each of the seven had been blazed mile by mile through themighty romance of an empire’s founding. Some of them for long stretchesare now overgrown by the herbage of the plain; some have faded back intothe desert they lined; and more than one has been shod with steel. Butalong them all flit and brood the memory-ghosts of old, rich-coloureddays. To the shout of teamster, the yell of savage, the creaking oftented ox-cart, and the rattle of the swifter mail-coach, there go dimshapes of those who had thrilled to that call of the West;—strong,brave men with the far look in their eyes, with those magic rude toolsof the pioneer, the rifle and the axe; women, too, equally heroic, of astock, fearless, ready, and staunch, bearing their sons and daughters infortitude; raising them to fear God, to love their country,—and tolabour. From the edge of our Republic these valiant ones toiled into thedump of prairie and mountain to live the raw new days and weld them toour history; to win fertile acres from the wilderness and charm thedesert to blossoming. And the time of these days and these people, withtheir tragedies and their comedies, was a time of epic splendour;—morevital with the stuff and colour of life, I think, than any since thestubborn gray earth out there was made to yield its treasure.

Of these seven historic highways the one richest in story is the oldSalt Lake Trail: this because at its western end was woven a romancewithin a romance;—a drama of human passions, of love and hate, of highfaith and low, of the beautiful and the ugly, of truth and lies; yetwith certain fine fidelities under it all; a drama so close-knit, soamazingly true, that one who had lightly designed to make a tale therewas dismayed by fact. So much more thrilling was it than any fiction hemight have imagined, so more than human had been the cunning of theMaster Dramatist, that the little make-believe he was pondering seemedclumsy and poor, and he turned from it to try to tell what had reallybeen.

In this story, then, the things that are strangest have most of truth.The make-believe is hardly more than a cement to join the queerlywrought stones of fact that were found ready. For, if the writer has nowand again had to divine certain things that did not show,—yet must havebeen,—surely these are not less than truth. One of these deductions isthe Lute of the Holy Ghost who came in the end to be the Little Man ofSorrows: who loved a woman, a child, and his God, but sinned throughpride of soul;—whose life, indeed, was a poem of sin and retribution.Yet not less true was he than the Lion of the Lord, the Archer ofParadise, the Wild Ram of the Mountains, or the gaunt, gray woman whomhurt love had crazed. For even now, as the tale is done, comes a drylittle note in the daily press telling how such a one actually did theother day a