And with the profoundest self respect, Her natural impulses inclined Toward the lord of humankind --

Toward her own elect.

Mysterious motherhood is there, And love of children chastened her,

And made her life calm and serene. For they, and not for wanderlust, Part of "the Overland," she crossed

Before the "closing scene."

Within these caverns two, her eyes Looked up toward her Paradise,

Or burned with earth's eternal flame. And in the ivory cavern hung, The marvel of a human tongue

That whispered low one name.

With lips of earth's celestial fire. With voice and glances that inspire,

She strove, but fell beside the way. -- A shallow grave in shifting sand, Along the tragic "Overland,"

A spirit gone away.

Another tragedy involved the Brown girls. They were happy in the wilderness on a ranch, and one day the scourges of the South came. The Comanches killed their parents, and took them away. They were recaptured, or rather purchased by Bent in 1839. They were then eighteen and twenty-one years of age respectively, and the older was widowed. Each had become the enforced wife of an Indian. The younger, whose brave still lived, said a few days later that she was going to return to the tent, because she was no longer fit to live with white people. Perhaps some mother can tell us whether that was the real reason she went back to the tribe. For back there in the wigwam of its father was a tiny little half-breed son, whose mute arms stretched through the desert night and whose wail and murmur in its sleep was of its mother.