Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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The highway out from Kansas City is as good as Riverside Drive, New York, or Chicago’s Boulevard. In the rush hours from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M., it is pretty heavily traveled—tourists, workmen building bungalows reaching out from the city, army trucks en route to and from the fort; but toward the west is the same ocean of green prairies as from the beginning, now in fields of alfalfa and clover scenting the air as did the old prairie roses.

We had just had such a plunging rain as used to leave this road, then of log corduroy and mud holes, a horror; and where the sticky adobé mud had splashed across the pavement, the swerve of our car to the grease of soil and gasoline, gave me a guess at what the swerve of army mule-drawn wagon must have been.

Fort Leavenworth, itself, is a sleepy little old city of retired and resident officers and citizens. It is the only sleepy thing in Kansas. As a fort, it is not liked by Army men. Since the ending of Indian Wars, chances for promotion are slim. Ambitious men are transferred elsewhere and the fort sleeps away its drowsy tranquil days. The Great War brought it again to life when as many as a hundred thousand men were at times encamped on the rolling hills and plains. You can see the abandoned buildings now for the most part occupied by colored families of troopers. The stables that used to roof and train hundreds and thousands of the finest army horses in America, are like the fort—sad relics of glories that have departed. The few horses yet there are beauties—perfect mounts; but how few! I was both sorry and glad. Sorry the day of the most beautiful creatures in the animal world had passed; glad these noble brutes would no longer be mangled to torture in war but had been replaced by machines that could not feel, however much the men driving the machine might suffer. The men have a vote on war. The horse hasn’t.