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[Frontispiece: LIFTING OFF HIS BROAD-BRIMMED HAT TO HER IN A GRACIOUS SWEEP]
THE LIONS OF THE LORD
A Tale of the Old West
By HARRY LEON WILSON
Author of "The Spenders"
Illustrated by ROSE CECIL O'NEILL
Published June, 1903
TO MY WIFE
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 certain brave, great thing it had seemed the imagined onemust be driven to do. Only he and I, perhaps, will be conscious of thestruggle back of that which was printed; but at least we two shall knowthat the Little Man of Sorrows is true, even though the cross where hefled to say his last prayer in the body has long since fallen and itsbars crumbled to desert dust.
Yet there are others still living in a certain valley of the mountainswho will know why the soul-proud youth came to bend under invisibleburdens, and why he feared, as an angel of vengeance, that early cowboywith the yellow hair, who came singing down from the high divide intoAmalon where a girl was waiting in her dream of a single love; otherswho, to this day, will do not more than whisper with averted faces ofthe crime that brought a curse upon the land; who still live in terrorof shapes that shuffle furtively behind them, fumbling sometimes attheir shoulders with weak hands, striving ever to come in front and turnupon them. But these will know only one side of the Little Man ofSorrows who was first the Lute of the Holy Ghost in the Poet's roster oftitles: since they have lacked his courage to try the great issue withtheir God.
New York City, May 1st, 1903.