This invitation appealed to me with especial force for I had long desired to study the Southern Cheyennes, and a tour with Stouch promised a rich harvest of fictional themes, for me. Furthermore it offered a most romantic experience for Zulime--just the kind of enlightenment I had promised her.
With no time to lose, we packed our trunks and took train for Kansas City enroute for Indian Territory, the scene of many of the most exciting romances of my youth, the stronghold of bank robbers, and the hiding place of military renegades.
On our way to Oklahoma, we visited Professor Taft in Hanover and I find this note recorded: "All day the wind blew, the persistent, mournful crying wind of the plain. The saddest, the most appealing sound in my world. It came with a familiar soft rush, a crowding presence, uttering a sighing roar--a vague sound out of which voices of lonely children and forgotten women broke. To the solitary farmer's wife such a wind brings tears or madness. I am tense with desire to escape. This bare little town on the ridge is appalling to me. Think of living here with the litany of this wind forever in one's ears."
By contrast West Salem, with its green, embracing hills, seemed a garden, a place of sweet content, a summer resort, and yet in this Kansas town Zulime had spent part of her girlhood. In this sun-smit cottage she had left her mother to find a place in the outside world just as I had left my mother in Dakota. From this town she had gone almost directly to Paris! It would be difficult to imagine a more amazing translation--and yet, now that she was back in the midst of it, she gave no sign of the disheartenment she must have felt. She met all her old friends and neighbors with unaffected interest and gayety.
Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie, across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the immemorial American drama,--only the stations on the railway broke the spell of the past with a modern word.