Kitabı oku: «The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas», sayfa 19
Marjie was never so fair and womanly as now. The brisk walk in the October air had put a pink bloom on her cheeks. Her hair lay in soft fluffy little waves about her head, and her big brown eyes, clear honest eyes, were full of a radiant light. My father brought my face and form back to her as he always did, and the last hand-clasp in that very room, the last glance from eyes full of love; and the memory was sweet to her.
"Mother said you wanted to see me," she said, "so I came in."
My father put her in his big easy-chair and sat down near her. His back was toward the window, and his face was shadowed, while his visitor's face was full in the light.
"Yes, Marjie, your mother has asked me to talk with you." I wonder at the man's self-control. "She is planning, or consenting to plans for your future, and she wants me to tell you I approve them. You seem very happy to-day."
A blush swept over the girl's face, and then the blood ebbed back leaving it white as marble. Men may abound in wisdom, but the wisest of them may not always interpret the swift bloom that lights the face of a girl and fades away as swiftly as it comes.
"She is consenting," my father assumed.
"If you are satisfied with the present arrangement, I do not need to say anything. I do not want to, anyhow. I only do it for the sake of your mother, for the sake of the wife of my best friend. For his sake too, God bless his memory!"
Marjie's confusion deepened. The words of my letter telling of her father's wishes were burning in her brain. With the thought of them, this hesitancy on the part of Judge Baronet brought a chill that made her shiver. Could it be that her mother was trying to influence my father in her favor? Her good judgment and the knowledge of her mother's sense of propriety forbade that. So she only murmured,
"I don't understand. I have no plans. I would do anything for my father, I don't know why I should be called to say anything," and then she broke down entirely and sat white and still with downcast eyes, her two shapely little hands clenched together.
"Marjie, this is very embarrassing for me," my father said kindly, "and as I say, it is only for Irving's sake I speak at all. If you feel you can manage your own affairs, it is not right for anybody to interfere," how tender his tones were, "but, my dear girl, maybe years and experience can give me the right to say a word or two for the sake of the friendship that has always been between us, a friendship future relations will of necessity limit to a degree. But if you have your plans all settled, I wish to know it. It will change the whole course of some proceedings I have been preparing ever since the war; and I want to know, too, this much for the sake of the man who died in my arms. I want to know if you are perfectly satisfied to accept the life now opening to you."
Marjie had seen my father every day since I left home. Every day he had spoken to her, and a silent sort of parental and filial love had grown up between the two. The sudden break in it had come to both now.
Women also may abound in wisdom but the wisest of them may not always interpret correctly.
"He had planned for Phil to marry Rachel, had sent him East on purpose. He was so polite to her when she was here. I have broken up his plans and his friendship is to be limited." So ran the girl's thoughts. "But I have no plans. I don't know what he means. Nothing new is opening to me."
A new phase of womanhood began suddenly for her, a call for self-dependence, for a judgment of her own, not the acceptance of events. When she spoke again, her sweet voice had a clear ring in it that startled the man before her.
"Judge Baronet, I do not know what you are talking about. I do not know of any plans for the future. I do not know what mother said to you. If I am concerned in the plans you speak of, I have a right to know what they are. If you are asked to approve of my doing, I certainly ought to know of what you mean to approve."
She had risen from her chair and was standing before him. Oh, she was pretty, and with this grace of womanly self-control, her beauty and her dignity combined into a new charm.
"Sit down, Marjie," my father said in kind command. "You know the purpose of Amos Judson's visit with your mother yesterday?"
"Business, I suppose," Marjie answered carelessly, "I am not admitted to these conferences." She smiled. "You know I wanted to talk with you about some business affairs some time ago, but – "
"Yes, I know, I understand," my father assured her. They both remembered only too well what had happened in that room on her last visit. For she had not been inside of the courthouse since the day of Rachel's sudden appearance there.
"Judge Baronet thinks I have nothing to bring Phil. I've heard everywhere how Phil wants a rich wife, and yet the Baronets have more property than anybody else here." So Marjie concluded mentally and then she asked innocently:
"How can Amos Judson's visit make this call here necessary?"
At last the light broke in. "She doesn't know anything yet, that's certain. But, by heavens, she must know. It's her right to know," my father thought.
"Marjie, your mother, in the goodness of her heart, and because of some sad and bitter circumstances, came here to-day to ask me to talk with you. I do this for her sake. You must not misunderstand me." He laid his hand a moment on her arm, lying on the table.
And then he told her all that her mother had told to him. Told it without comment or coloring, sparing neither Phil, nor himself nor her father in the recital. If ever a story was correctly reported in word and spirit, this one was.
"She shall have Judson's side straight from me first, and we'll depend on events for further statement," he declared to himself.
"Now, little girl, I'm asked to urge you for your own good name, for your mother's maintenance, and your own, for the sake of that boy of mine, and for my own good, as well, and most of all for the sake of your father's memory, revered here as no other man who ever lived in Springvale – for all these reasons, I'm asked to urge you to take this man for your husband."
He was standing before her now, strong, dignified, handsome, courteous. Nature's moulds hold not many such as he. Before him rose up Marjie. Her cloak had fallen from her shoulders, and lay over the arm of her chair. Looking steadily into his face with eyes that never wavered in their gaze, she replied:
"I may be poor, but I can work for mother and myself. I'm not afraid to work. You and your son may have done wrong. If you have, I cannot cover it by any act of mine, not even if I died for you. I don't believe you have done wrong. I do not believe one word of the stories about Phil. He may want to marry a rich girl," her voice wavered here, "but that is his choice; it is no sin. And as to protecting my father's name, Judge Baronet, it needs no protection. Before Heaven, he never did a dishonest thing in all his life. There has been a tangling of his affairs by somebody, but that does not change the truth. The surest way to bring dishonor to his name is for me to marry a man I do not and could not love; a man I believe to be dishonest in money matters, and false to everybody. It is no disgrace to work for a living here in Kansas. Better girls than I am do it. But it is a disgrace here and through all eternity to sell my soul. As I hope to see my father again, I believe he would not welcome me to him if I did. Good and just as you are, you are using your influence all in vain on me."
Judge Baronet felt his soul expand with every word she uttered. Passing round the table, he took both her cold hands in his strong, warm palms.
"My daughter," neither he nor the girl misunderstood the use of the word here, "my dear, dear girl, you are worthy of the man who gave up his life on Missionary Ridge to save his country. God bless you for the true-hearted, noble woman that you are." He gently stroked the curly brown locks away from her forehead, and stooping kissed it, softly, as he would kiss the brow of a saint.
Marjie sank down in her seat, and as she did so my letter fell from the pocket of the cloak she had thrown aside. As Judge Baronet stooped to pick it up, he caught sight of my well-known handwriting on the envelope. He looked up quickly and their eyes met. The wild roses were in her cheeks now, and the dew of teardrops on her downcast lashes. He said not a word, but laid the letter face downward in her lap. She put it in her pocket and rose to go.
"If you need me, Marjie, I have a force to turn loose against your enemies, and ours. And you will need me. As a man in this community I can assure you of that. You never needed friends as you will in the days before you now. I am ready at your call. And let me assure you also, that in the final outcome, there is nothing to fear. Good-bye."
He looked down into her upturned face. Something neither would have put into words came to both, and the same picture came before each mind. It was the picture of a young soldier out at Fort Wallace, gathering back the strength the crucial test of a Plains campaign had cost him.
"There'll be the devil to pay," my father said to himself, as he watched Marjie passing down the leaf-strewn walk, "but not a hair of her head shall suffer. When the time comes, I'll send for Judson, as I promised to do."
And Marjie, holding the letter in her hand thrust deep in her cloak pocket, felt strength and hope and courage pulsing in her veins, and a peace that she had not known for many days came with its blessing to her troubled soul.
CHAPTER XXI
THE CALL TO SERVICE
We go to rear a wall of men on Freedom's Southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree the rugged Northern pine!
– WHITTIER.
"Phil Baronet, you thon of a horthe-thief, where have you been keeping yourthelf? We've been waiting here thinthe Thummer before latht to meet you."
That was Bud Anderson's greeting. Pink-cheeked, sturdy, and stubby as a five-year-old, he was standing in my path as I slipped from my horse in front of old Fort Hays one October day a fortnight after the rescue of Colonel Forsyth's little company.
"Bud, you tow-headed infant, how the dickens and tomhill did you manage to break into good society out here?" I cried, as we clinched in each other's arms, for Bud's appearance was food to my homesick hunger.
"When you git through, I'm nixt into the barber's chair."
I had not noticed O'mie leaning against a post beside the way, until that Irish brogue announced him.
"Why, boys, what's all this delegation mean?"
"Aw," O'mie drawled. "You've been elected to Congress and we're the proud committy av citizens in civilians' clothes, come to inform you av your elevation."
"You mean you've come to get first promise of an office under me. Sorry, but I know you too well to jeopardize the interest of the Republican party and the good name of Kansas by any rash promises. It's dinner time, and I'm hungry. I don't believe I'll ever get enough to eat again."
Oh, it was good to see them, albeit our separation had amounted to hardly sixty days. Bud had been waiting for me almost a week; and O'mie, to Bud's surprise, had come upon him unannounced that morning. The dining-room was crowded; and as soon as dinner was over we went outside and sat down together where we could visit our fill unmolested. They wanted to know about my doings, but I was too eager to hear all the home news to talk of myself.
"Everybody all right when I left," Bud asserted. "I got off a few dayth before thith mitherable thon of Erin. Didn't know he'd tag me, or I'd have gone to Canada." He gave O'mie an affectionate slap on the shoulder as he spoke.
"Your father and Aunt Candace are well, and glad you came out of the campaign you've been makin' a record av unfadin' glory in. Judge Baronet was the last man I saw when I left town," O'mie said.
"Why, where was Uncle Cam?" I asked.
"Oh, pretendin' to be busy somewheres. Awful busy man, that Cam Gentry." O'mie smiled at the remembrance. He knew why tender-hearted Cam had fled from a good-bye scene. "Dave Mead's goin' to start to California in a few days." He rattled on, "The church supper in October was the biggest they've had yet. Dever's got a boil on the back of his neck, and Jim Conlow's drivin' stage for him. Jim had a good job in Topeka, but come back to Springvale. Can't keep the Conlows corralled anywhere else. Everybody else is doing fine except Grandma Mead. She's failin'. Old town looked pretty good to me when I looked back at it from the east bluff of the Neosho."
It had looked good to each one of us at the same place when each started out to try the West alone. Somehow we did not care to talk, for a few minutes.
"What brought you out here, Bud?" I asked to break the spell.
"Oh, three or four thingth. I wanted to thee you," Bud answered. "You never paid me that fifteen thenth you borrowed before you went to college."
"And then," he continued, "the old town on the Neosho'th too thmall for me. Our family ith related to the Daniel Boone tribe of Indianth, and can't have too big a crowd around. Three children of the family are at home, and I wanted to come out here anyhow. I'd like to live alwayth on the Plainth and have a quiet grave at the end of the trail where the wind blowth thteady over me day after day."
We were lounging against the side of the low building now in the warm afternoon sunshine, and Bud's eyes were gazing absently out across the wide Plains. Although I had been away from home only two months, I felt twenty years older than this fair-haired, chubby boy, sitting there so full of blooming life and vigor. I shivered at the picture his words suggested.
"Don't joke, Bud. There's a grave at the end of most of the trails out here. The trails aren't very long, some of 'em. The wind sweeps over 'em lonely and sad day after day. They're quiet enough, Heaven knows. The wrangle and noise are all on the edge of 'em, just as you're getting ready to get in."
"I'm not joking, Phil. All my life I have wanted to get out here. It'th a fever in the blood."
We talked a while of the frontier, of the chances of war, and of the Indian raids with their trail of destruction, death, torture and captivity of unspeakable horror.
The closing years of the decade of the sixties in American history saw the closing events of the long and bitter, but hopeless struggle of a savage race against a superior civilized force. From the southern bound of British America to the northern bound of old Mexico the Plains warfare was waged.
The Western tribes, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, and Kiowa, and Brule, and Sioux and Comanche were forced to quarter themselves on their reservations again and again with rations and clothing and equipments for all their needs. With fair, soft promises in return from their chief men these tribes settled purringly in their allotted places. Through each fall and winter season they were "good Indians," wards of the nation; their "untutored mind saw God in clouds, or heard him in the wind."
Eastern churches had an "Indian fund" in their contribution boxes, and very pathetic and beautifully idyllic was the story the sentimentalists told, the story of the Indian as he looked in books and spoke on paper. But the Plains had another record, and the light called History is pitiless. When the last true story is written out, it has no favoring shadows for sentimentalists who feel more than they know.
Each Winter the "good Indians" were mild and gentle. But with the warmth of Spring and the fruitfulness of summer, with the green grasses of the Plains for their ponies, with wild game in the open, and the labor of the industrious settler of the unprotected frontier as a stake for the effort, the "good Indian" came forth from his reservation. Like the rattlesnake from its crevice, he uncoiled in the warm sunshine, grew and flourished on what lay in his pathway, and full of deadly venom he made a trail of terror and death.
This sort of thing went on year after year until, in the late Summer of 1868, the crimes of the savages culminated in those terrible raids through western Kansas, whose full particulars even the official war records deem unfit to print.
Such were the times the three of us from Springvale were discussing on the south side of the walls of old Fort Hays in the warm sunshine of an October afternoon.
We were new to the Plains and we did not dream of the tragedies that were taking place not many miles away from the shadow of the Fort on that October afternoon, tragedies whose crimes we three would soon be called forth to help to avenge. For even as we lounged idly there in the soft sunshine, and looked away through shimmering seas of autumn haze toward the still land where Bud was to find his quiet grave at the end of the trail – as we talked of the frontier and its needs, up in the Saline Valley, a band of Indians was creeping stealthily upon a cornfield where a young man was gathering corn. In his little home just out of sight was a pretty, golden-haired girl, the young settler's bride of a few months. Through the window she caught sight of her husband's horse racing wildly toward the house. She did not know that her husband, wounded and helpless, lay by the river bank, pierced by Indian arrows. Only one thought was hers, the thought that her husband had been hurt – maybe killed – in a runaway. What else could this terrified horse with its flying harness ends mean? She rushed from the house and started toward the field.
A shout of fiendish glee fell on her ears. She was surrounded by painted savage men, human devils, who caught her by the arms, dragged her about by her long silky, golden hair, beat her brutally in her struggles to free herself, bound her at last, and thrusting her on a pony, rode as only Indians ride, away toward the sunset. And their captive, the sweet girl-wife of gentle birth and gentle rearing, the happy-hearted young home-maker on the prairie frontier, singing about her work an hour before, dreaming of the long, bright years with her loved one – God pity her! For her the gates of a living Hell had swung wide open, and she, helpless and horror-stricken, was being dragged through them into a perdition no pen can picture. And so they rode away toward the sunset.
On and on they went through days and days of unutterable blackness, of suffering and despair. On, until direction and space were lost to measure. For her a new, pitiless, far-off heaven looked down on a new agonized earth. The days ran into months, and no day had in it a ray of hope, a line of anything but misery.
And again beyond the Saline, where the little streams turn toward the Republican River, in another household the same tragedy of the times was being played, with all its settings of terror and suffering. Here the grown-up daughter of the home, a girl of eighteen years, was wrenched from arms that clung to her, and, bound on a pony's back, was hurried three hundred miles away into an unknown land. For her began the life of a slave. She was the victim of brute lust, the object of the vengeful jealousy of the squaws. The starved, half-naked, wretched girl, whose eighteen years had been protected in the shelter of a happy Christian home, was now the captive laborer whose tasks strong men would stagger under. God's providence seemed far away in those days of the winning of the prairie.
Fate, by and by, threw these two women together. Their one ray of comfort was the sight of one another. And for both the days dragged heavily by, the two women of my boyhood's dreams. Women of whose fate I knew nothing as we sat by the south side of old Fort Hays that afternoon forty years ago.
"Did you know, boys, that General Sheridan is not going to let those tribes settle down to a quiet winter as they've been allowed to do every year since they were put on their reservations?" I asked O'mie and Bud. "I've been here long enough to find out that these men out here won't stand for it any longer," I went on. "They're MEN on these Plains, who are doing this homesteading up and down these river valleys, and you write every letter of the word with a capital."
"What'th going to be done?" Bud queried.
"Sheridan's going to carry a campaign down into their own country and lick these tribes into behaving themselves right now, before another Summer and another outbreak like that one two months ago."
"What's these Kansas men with their capital letters got to do with it?" put in O'mie.
"Governor Crawford has issued a call at Sheridan's command, for a Kansas regiment to go into service for six months, and help to do this thing up right. It means more to these settlers on the boundary out here than to anybody else. And you just see if that regiment isn't made up in a hurry."
I was full of my theme. My two months beyond the soft, sheltered life of home had taught me much; and then I was young and thought I knew much, anyhow.
"What are you going to do, Phil?" O'mie asked.
"I? I'm going to stay by this thing for a while. The Baronets were always military folks. I'm the last of the line, and I'm going to give my fighting strength, what little I have, to buy these prairies for homes and civilization. I'm going to see the Indian rule broken here, or crawl into the lonely grave Bud talks about and pull the curly mesquite over me for a coverlet. I go to Topeka to-morrow to answer Governor Crawford's call for volunteers for a cavalry company to go out on a winter campaign against the rascally redskins. They're going to get what they need. If you mix up with Custer, you'll see."
"And when the campaign's over," queried O'mie, "will you stay in the army?"
"No, O'mie, I'll find a place. The world is wide. But look here, boy. You haven't told me how you got pried loose and kicked out yet. Bud's an exception. The rest of us boys had a reason for leaving the best town on earth."
"You're just right, begorra!" O'mie replied with warmth. "I was kicked out av town by His Majesty, the prophet Amos, only you've got to spell it with an 'f' instead av a 'ph.'"
"Now, O'mie, confess the whole sin at once, please."
O'mie looked up with that sunshiny face that never stayed clouded long, and chuckled softly. "Judson's on the crest right now. Oh, let him ride. He's doomed, so let him have his little strut. He comes to me a few days backward into the gone on, and says, says he, important and commercial like, 'O'mie, I shall not need you any more. I've got a person to take your place.' 'All right,' I responds, respectful, 'just as you please. When shall I lave off?' 'To-morrow mornin',' he answers, an' looks at me as if to say, 'Nothin' left for you but the poor-house.' And indade, a clerk under Judson don't make no such bank account as he made under Irving Whately. I ain't ready to retire yet."
"And do you mean to say that because Amos Judson turned you off and cut you out of his will, you had to come out to this forsaken land? I thought better of the town," I declared.
"Oh, don't you mind! Cris Mead offered me a place in the bank. Dr. Hemingway was fur havin' me fill his pulpit off an' on. He's gettin' old. An' Judge Baronet was all but ready to adopt me in the place av a son he'd lost. But I knowed the boy'd soon be back."
O'mie gave me a sidelong glance, but I gave no hint of any feeling.
"No, I was like Bud, ready to try the frontier," he added more seriously. "I'm goin' down with you to join this Kansas regiment."
"Now what the deuce can you do in the army, O'mie?" I could not think of him anywhere but in Springvale.
"I want to live out av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered. "And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come to Springvale last month?"
"Give it up," I answered.
"Father Le Claire."
"Oh, the good man!" Bud exclaimed.
"Where has he been? and where was he going?" I asked coldly.
O'mie looked at me curiously. He was shrewder than Bud, and he caught the tone I had meant to conceal.
"Where? Just now he's gone to St. Louis. He's in a hospital there. He's been sick. I never saw him so white and thin as whin he left. He told me he expected to be with the Osages this Winter."
"I'm glad of that," I remarked.
"Why?" O'mie spoke quickly.
"Oh, I was afraid he might go out West. It's hard on priests in the West."
O'mie looked steadily at me, but said nothing.
"Who taketh your plathe, O'mie?" Bud asked.
"That's the beauty av it. It's a lady," O'mie answered.
Somehow my heart grew sick. Could it be Marjie, I wondered. I knew money matters were a problem with the Whatelys, but I had hoped for better fortune through my father's help. Maybe, though, they would have none of him now any more than of myself. When Marjie and I were engaged I did not care for her future, for it was to be with me, and my burden was my joy then. Not that earning a living meant any disgrace to the girl. We all learned better than that early in the West.
"Well, who be thaid lady?" Bud questioned.
"Miss Letitia Conlow," O'mie answered with a grave face.
"Oh, well, don't grieve, O'mie; it might be worse. Cheer up!" I said gayly.
"It couldn't be, by George! It just couldn't be no worse." O'mie was more than grave, he was sad now. "Not for me, bedad! I'm glad." He breathed deeply of the sweet, pure air of the Plains. "I can live out here foine, but there's goin' to be the divil to pay in the town av Springvale in the nixt six months. I'm glad to be away."
The next day I left the fort for Topeka. My determination to stay in the struggle was not merely a young man's love of adventure, nor was my declaration of what would be done to the Indian tribes an idle boast. The tragic days of Kansas were not all in its time of territorial strife and border ruffianism. The story of the Western Plains – the short grass country we call it now – in the decade following the Civil War is a tragedy of unparalleled suffering and danger and heroism. In the cold calculation of the official reports the half-year I had entered on has its tabulated record of one hundred and fifty-eight men murdered, sixteen wounded, forty-one scalped, fourteen women tortured, four women and twenty-four children carried into captivity. And nearly all this record was made in the Saline and Solomon and Republican River valleys in Kansas.
The Summer of the preceding year a battalion of soldiers called the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry spent four months on the Plains. Here they met and fought two deadly foes, the Indians and the Asiatic cholera. Theirs was a record of bravery and endurance; and their commander, Major Horace L. Moore, keeps always a place in my own private hall of fame.
Winter had made good Indians out of the savage wretches, as usual; but the Summer of 1868 brought that official count of tragedy with all the unwritten horror that history cannot burden itself to carry. Only one thing seemed feasible now, to bear the war straight into the heart of the Indian country in a winter campaign, to deal an effectual blow to the scourge of the Plains, this awful menace to the frontier homes. General Sheridan had asked Kansas to furnish a cavalry regiment for United States military service for six months.
The capital city was a wide-awake place that October. The call for twelve hundred men was being answered by the veterans of the Plains and by the young men of Kansas. The latter took up the work as many a volunteer in the Civil War began it – in a sort of heyday of excitement and achievement. They gave little serious thought to the cost, or the history their record was to make. But in the test that followed they stood, as the soldiers of the nation had stood before them, courageous, unflinching to the last. Little notion had those rollicking young fellows of what lay before them – a winter campaign in a strange country infested by a fierce and cunning foe who observed no etiquette of civilized warfare.
At the Teft House, where Bud and O'mie and I stopped, I met Richard Tillhurst. We greeted each other cordially enough.
"So you're here to enlist, too," he said. "I thought maybe you were on your way home. I am going to enlist myself and give up teaching altogether if I can pass muster." He was hardly of the physical build for a soldier. "Have you heard the news?" he went on. "Judson and Marjory are engaged. Marjie doesn't speak of it, of course, but Judson told Dr. Hemingway and asked him to officiate when the time comes. Mrs. Whately says it's between the young people, and that means she has given her consent. Judson spends half his time at Whately's, whether Marjie's there or not. There's something in the air down there this Fall that's got everybody keyed up one way or another. Tell Mapleson's been like a boy at a circus, he's so pleased over something; and Conlow has a grin on his face all the time. Everybody seems just unsettled and anxious, except Judge Baronet. Honestly, I don't see how that town could keep balanced without him. He sails along serene and self-possessed. Always knows more than he tells."
"I guess Springvale is safe with him, and we can go out and save the frontier," I said carelessly.
"For goodness' sake, who goes there?" Tillhurst pushed me aside and made a rush out of doors, as a lady passed before the windows. I followed and caught a glimpse of the black hair and handsome form of Rachel Melrose. At the same moment she saw me. Her greeting lacked a little of its former warmth, but her utter disregard of anything unpleasant having been between us was positively admirable. Her most coquettish smiles, however, were for Tillhurst, but that didn't trouble me. Our interview was cut short by the arrival of the stage from the south just then, and I turned from Tillhurst to find myself in my father's embrace. What followed makes one of the sacred memories a man does not often put into print.
We wanted to be alone, so we left the noisy hotel and strolled out toward the higher level beyond the town. There was only brown prairie then stretching to the westward and dipping down with curve and ravine to the Kaw River on the one side and the crooked little Shunganunga Creek on the other. Away in the southwest the graceful curve of Burnett's Mound, a low height like a tiny mountain-peak, stood out purple and hazy in the October sunlight. A handful of sturdy young people were taking their way to Lincoln College, the little stone structure that was to be dignified a month later by a new title, Washburn College, in honor of its great benefactor, Ichabod Washburn.
