There was a world of benediction in his deep tones, and his smile was

genial, as he followed us to the street and stood as if watching for

some one.

"I will meet you at San Miguel's to-morrow afternoon, Gail," Eloise

said, as we reached a low but pretentious adobe dwelling. "This is my

home now."

"Your new Mexican homes are thick-walled, and you live all on the

inside," I said, as we paused at the doorway. "They make me think of the

lower invertebrates, hard-shelled, soft-bodied animals. Up on the Kansas

prairies and the Missouri bluffs we have a central vetebra--the family

hearth-stone--and we live all around it. That is the people who have

them do. There isn't much home life for a freighter of the plains

anywhere. Good by, Little Lees." I took her offered hand. "I'm glad you

have let me be your friend, a hard-shelled bull-whacker like me."

The street was full of shadows and the evening air was chill as the door

closed on that sweet face and cloud of golden hair. But the pressure of

warm white fingers lingered long in my sense of touch as I retraced my

steps to the trail's end. At the church door I saw Father Josef still

waiting, as if watching for somebody.

All that Eloise had told me ran through my mind, but I felt sure that

neither financial nor churchly influence in Santa Fé could be turned to

evil purposes so long as men like Felix Narveo and Father Josef were

there. And then I thought of Esmond Clarenden, himself neither Mexican

nor Roman Catholic, who, nevertheless, drew to himself such

fair-dealing, high-minded men as these, always finding the best to aid

him, and combating the worst with daring fearlessness. Surely with the

priest and the merchant and Jondo as my uncle's representative, no harm

could come to the girl whom I knew that I should always love.

And with my mind full of Eloise and her need I sought out Jondo and

listened to his story.

XIV

OPENING THE RECORD

Fighting for leave to live and labor well,

God flung me peace and ease.

--"A SONG OF THE ENGLISH."

I found Jondo in the little piazza opening into the hotel court.

"Where did you leave Krane and Bev?" he asked, as I sat down beside him.

"I didn't leave them; they left me," I answered.

"Oh, you young bucks are all alike. You know just enough to be good to

yourselves. You don't think much about anybody else," Jondo said, with a

smile.

"I think of others, Jondo, and for that reason I want you to tell me

that story about Ferdinand Ramero that you promised to tell me one night

back on the trail."

Jondo gave a start.

"I'd like to forget that man, not talk about him," he replied.

"But it is to help somebody else, not just to be good to myself, that I

want to know it," I insisted, using his own terms. And then I told him

what Eloise had told me in the San Miguel church.

"Are the Ramero's so powerful here that they can control the Church in

their scheme to get what they want?" I asked.

"It would be foolish to underestimate the strength of Ferdinand Ramero,"

Jondo replied, adding, grimly, "It has been my lot to know the best of

men who could make me believe all men are good, and the worst of men who

make me doubt all humanity." He clenched his fists as if to hold himself

in check, and something, neither sigh nor groan nor oath nor prayer, but

like them all, burst from his lips.

"If you ever have a real cross, Gail, thank the Lord for the green

prairies and the open plains, and the danger-stimulus of the old Santa

Fé Trail. They will seal up your wounds, and soften your hard,

rebellious heart, and make you see things big, and despise the narrow

little crooks in your path."

One must have known Jondo, with his bluff manner and sunny smile and

daring spirit, to feel the force, of these brave sad words. I felt

intuitively that I had laid bare a wound of his by my story.

"It is for Eloise, not for my curiosity, that I have come to you," I

said, gently.

"And you didn't come too soon, boy." Jondo was himself in a moment. "It

is another cruel act in the old tragedy of Ramero against Clarenden and

others."

"Will the Church be bribed by the St. Vrain estate and urge this

wedding?" I asked.

"The Church considers money as so much power for the Kingdom. I have

heard that the St. Vrain estate was left in Ramero's hands with the

proviso that if Eloise should marry foolishly before she was twenty-five

she, would lose her property. Do you see the trick in the game, and why

Ramero can say that if he chooses he can take her heritage away from

her? But as he keeps everything in his own hands it is hard to know the

truth about anything connected with money matters."

"Would Father Josef be party to such a transaction?" I asked, angrily.

"Ramero thinks so, but he is mistaken," Jondo replied.

"What makes you think he won't be?" I insisted.

"Because I knew Father Josef before he became a priest, and why he took

the vows," Jondo declared. "Unless a man brings some manhood to the

altar, he will not find it in the title nor the dress there, it makes no

difference whether he be Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew, or heathen.

Father Josef was a gentleman before he was a priest."

"Well, if he's all right, why did he bring Eloise back here into the

heart of all this trouble?" I questioned.

Jondo sat thinking for a little while, then he said, assuringly:

"I don't know his motive, unless he felt he could protect her here

himself; but I tell you, my boy, he can be trusted. Let me tell you

something, Gail. When Esmond Clarenden and I were boys back in a New

England college we knew two fellows from the Southwest whose fathers

were in official circles at Washington. One was Felix Narveo,

thoroughbred Mexican, thoroughbred gentleman, a bit lacking in

initiative sometimes, for he came from the warmer, lazier lands, but as

true as the compass in his character. The other fellow was Dick Verra,

French father, English mother; I think he had a strain of Indian blood

farther back somewhere, but he would have been a prince in any tribe or

nation. A happy, wholesome, red-blooded, young fellow, with the world

before him for his conquest.

"We knew another fellow, too, Fred Ramer, self-willed, imperious,

extravagant in his habits, greedy and unscrupulous; but he was handsome

and masterful, with a compelling magnetism that made us admire him and

bound us to him. He had never known what it meant to have a single wish

denied him. And with his make-up, he would stop at nothing to have his

own way, until his wilful pride and stubbornness and love of luxury

ruined him. But in our college days we were his satellites. He was

always in debt to all of us, for money was his only god and we never

dared to press him for payment. The only one of us who ever overruled

him was Dick Verra. But Dick was a born master of men. There was one

other chum of ours, but I'll tell you about him later. Boys together, we

had many escapades and some serious problems, until by the time our

college days were over we were bound together by those ties that are

made in jest and broken with choking voices and eyes full of tears."

Jondo paused and I waited, silent, until he should continue.

"Things happened to that little group of college men as time went on.

You know your uncle's life, leading merchant of Kansas City and the

Southwest; and mine, plainsman and freighter on the Santa Fé Trail.

Felix Narveo's history is easily read. Esmond Clarenden came down here

at the outbreak of the Mexican War, and together he and Narveo laid the

foundation for the present trail commerce that is making the country at

either end of it rich and strong. Dick Verra is now Father Josef." Jondo

paused as if to gather force for the rest of the story. Then he said:

"Back at college we all knew Mary Marchland, a beautiful Louisiana girl

who visited in Washington and New England, and all of us were in love

with her. When our life-lines crossed again Clarenden had come to St.

Louis. About that time his two older brothers and their wives died

suddenly of yellow fever, leaving you and Beverly alone. It was Felix

Narveo who brought you up to St. Louis to your uncle."

"I remember that. The steamboat, and the Spanish language, and Felix

Narveo's face. I recalled that when I saw him years ago," I exclaimed.

"You always were all eyes and ears, remembering names and faces, where

Beverly would not recall anything," Jondo declared.

"And what became of your Fred Ramer?" I asked.

"He is Ferdinand Ramero here. He married Narveo's sister later. She is

not the mother of Marcos, but a second wife. She owned a tract of land

inherited from the Narveo estate down in the San Christobal country.

There is a lonely ranch house in a picturesque cañon, and many acres of

grazing-land. She keeps it still as hers, although her stepson, Marcos,

claims it now. It is for her sake that Narveo doesn't dare to move

openly against Ramero. And in his masterful way he has enough influence

with a certain ring of Mexicans here, some of whom are Narveo's

freighters, to reach pretty far into the Indian country. That's why I

knew those Mexicans were lying to us about the Kiowas at Pawnee Rock. I

could see Ramero's gold pieces in their hands. He joined the Catholic

Church, and plays the Pharisee generally. But the traits of his young

manhood, intensified, are still his. He is handsome, and attractive, and

rich, and influential, but he is also cold-blooded, and greedy for money

until it is his ruling passion, villainously unscrupulous, and

mercilessly unforgiving toward any one who opposes his will; and his

capacity for undying hatred is appalling."

And this was the man who was seeking to control the life of Eloise St.

Vrain. I fairly groaned in my anger.

"The failure to win Mary Marchland's love was the first time in his life

that Fred Ramer's will had ever been thwarted, and he went mad with

jealousy and anger. Gail, they are worse masters than whisky and opium,

once they get a man down."

Jondo paused, and when he spoke again he did it hurriedly, as one who,

from a sense of duty, would glance at the dead face of an enemy and turn

away.

"When Fred lost his suit with Mary, he determined to wreck her life. He

came between her and the man she loved with such adroit cruelty that

they were separated, and although they loved each other always, they

never saw each other again. Through a terrible network of

misunderstandings she married Theron St. Vrain. He, by the way, was the

other college chum I spoke of just now. He and his foster-brother,

Bertrand, were wards of Fred Ramer's father. But their guardian, the

elder Ramer, had embezzled most of their property and there was bitter

enmity between them and him. Theron and Mary were the parents of Eloise

St. Vrain. It is no wonder that she is beautiful. She had Mary Marchland

for a mother. Theron St. Vrain died early, and the management of his

property fell into Fred Ramer's hands. At Mary's death it would descend

to Eloise, with the proviso I just mentioned of an unworthy marriage. In

that case, Ramer, at his own discretion, could give the estate to the

Church. Nobody knows when Mary Marchland died, nor where she is buried,

except Fred and his confessor, Father Josef."

"How far can a man's hate run, Jondo?" I asked.

"Oh, not so far as a man's love. Listen, Gail." Never a man had a truer

eye and a sweeter smile than my big Jondo.

"Fred Ramer was desperately in need of money when he was plotting to

darken the life of Mary Marchland--that was just before the birth of

Eloise--and through her sorrow to break the heart of the man whom she

loved--I said we college boys were all in love with her, you remember.

Let me make it short now. One night Fred's father was murdered, by whom

was never exactly proven. But he was last seen alive with his ward,

Theron St. Wain, who, with his foster-brother, Bertrand, thoroughly

despised him for his plain robbery of their heritage.

"The case was strong against Theron, for the evidence was very damaging,

and it would have gone hard with him but for the foster-brother.

Bertrand St. Wain took the guilt upon himself by disappearing suddenly.

He was supposed to have drowned himself in the lower Mississippi, for

his body, recognized only by some clothing, was recovered later in a

drift and decently buried. So _he_ was effaced from the records of man."

In the dim light Jondo's blue eyes were like dull steel and his face was

a face of stone, but he continued:

"Just here Clarenden comes into the story. He learned it through Felix

Narveo, and Felix got it from the Mexicans themselves, that Fred Ramer

had plotted with them to put his father out of the way--I said he was

desperately in need of money--and to lay the crime on Theron St.

Vrain, by whose disgrace the life of Mary Marchland would be blighted,

and Fred would have his revenge and his father's money. Narveo was

afraid to act against Ramer, but nothing ever scared Esmond Clarenden

away from what he wanted to do. Through his friendship for St. Vrain, to

whom some suspicion still clung, and that lost foster-brother, Bertrand,

he turned the screws on Fred Ramer that drove him out of the country. He

landed, finally, at Santa Fé, and became Ferdinand Ramero. He managed by

his charming manners to enchant the sister of Felix Narveo--and you know

the rest."

Jondo paused.

"Didn't Felix Narveo go to Fort Leavenworth once, just before Uncle

Esmond brought us with him to Santa Fé?" I asked.

"Yes, he went to warn Clarenden not to leave you there unprotected, for

a band of Ramero's henchmen were on their way then to the Missouri

River--we passed them at Council Grove--to kidnap you three and take you

to old Mexico," Jondo said. "An example of Fred's efforts to get even

with Clarenden and of the loyalty of Narveo to his old college chum. The

same gang of Mexicans had kidnapped Little Blue Flower and given her to

the Kiowas."

"You told me that Uncle Esmond forced Ferdinand Ramero out of the

country on account of a wrong done to you, Jondo," I reminded the big

plainsman.

"He did," Jondo replied. "I told you that we all loved Mary Marchland.

Fred Ramer broke under his loss of her, and became the devil's own tool

of hate and revenge, and what generally gets tied up with these sooner

or later, a passion for money and irregular means of getting it. Money

is as great an asset for hate as for love, and Fred sold his soul for it

long ago. Clarenden came to the frontier and lost himself in the

building of the plains commerce, and his heart he gave to the three

orphan children to whom he gave a home. When New Mexico came under our

flag Narveo came with it, a good citizen and a loyal patriot. He married

a Mexican woman of culture and lives a contented life. Dick Verra went

into the Church. I came to the plains, and the stimulus of danger, and

the benediction of the open sky, and the healing touch of the prairie

winds, and the solemn stillness of the great distances have made me

something more of a man than I should have been. Maybe I was hurt the

worst. Clarenden thought I was. Sometimes I think Dick Verra got the

best of all of us."

Jondo's voice trailed off into silence and I knew what his hurt

was--that he was the man whom Mary Marchland had loved, from whom Fred

Ramer, by his cruel machinations, had separated her--"_and although they

loved each other always, they never saw each other again_." Poor Jondo!

What a man among men this unknown freighter of the plains might have

been--and what a loss to the plains in the best of the trail years if

Jondo had never dared its dangers for the safety of the generations to

come.

But the thought of Eloise, driven out momentarily by Jondo's story, came

rushing in again.

"You said you put a ring around Ramero to keep him in Santa Fé. Can't we

get Eloise outside of it?" I urged, anxiously.

"Maybe I should have said that Father Josef put it around him for me,"

Jondo replied. "He confessed his crimes fully to the Church. He couldn't

get by Father Josef. Here he is much honored and secure and we let him

alone. The disgrace he holds the secret of--he alone--is that the father

of Eloise killed his father, the crime for which the foster-brother

fell. Ramero as guardian of Eloise and her property legally could have

kept her here. Only a man like Clarenden would have dared to take her

away, though he had the pleading call of her mother's last wish. Gail, I

have told you the heart-history of half a dozen men. If this had stopped

with us we could forgive after a while, but it runs down to you and

Beverly and Eloise and Marcos, who will carry out his father's plans to

the letter. So the battle is all to be fought over again. Let me leave

you a minute or two. I'll not be gone long."

I sat alone, staring out at the shadowy court and, above it, the blue

night-sky of New Mexico inlaid with stars, until a rush of feet in the

hall and a shout of inquiry told me that Beverly Clarenden was hunting

for me.

Meantime the girl in Mexican dress, who had come out of the church with

Father Josef when he came to greet Eloise and me, had passed unnoticed

through the Plaza and out on the way leading to the northeast. Here she

came to the blind adobe wall of La Garita, whose olden purpose one still

may read in the many bullet-holes in its brown sides. Here she paused,

and as the evening shadows lengthened the dress and wall blended their

dull tones together.

Beverly Clarenden, who had gone with Rex Krane up to Fort Marcy that

evening, had left his companion to watch the sunset and dream of Mat

back on the Missouri bluff, while he wandered down La Garita. He did not

see the Mexican woman standing motionless, a dark splotch against a dun

wall, until a soft Hopi voice called, eagerly, "Beverly, Beverly."

The black scarf fell from the bright face, and Indian garb--not Po-a-be,

the student of St. Ann's and the guest of the Clarenden home, with the

white Grecian robe and silver headband set with coral pendants, as

Beverly had seen her last in the side porch on the night of Mat's

wedding, but Little Blue Flower, the Indian of the desert lands, stood

before him.

"Where the devil--I mean the holy saints and angels, did you come from?"

Beverly cried, in delight, at seeing a familiar face.

"I came here to do Father Josef some service. He has been good to me. I

bring a message."

She reached out her hand with a letter. Beverly took the letter and the

hand. He put the message in his pocket, but he did not release the

hand.

"That's something for Jondo. I'll see that he gets it, all right. Tell

me all about yourself now, Little Run-Off-and-Never-Come-Back." It was

Beverly's way to make people love him, because he loved people.

It was late at last, too late for prudence, older heads would agree,

when these two separated, and my cousin came to pounce upon me in the

hotel court to tell me of his adventure.

"And I learned a lot of things," he added. "That Indian in the Plaza

to-day is Santan, or Satan, dead sure; and you'd never guess, but he's

the same redskin--Apache red--that was out at Agua Fria that time we

were there long ago. The very same little sneak! He followed us clear to

Bent's Fort. He put up a good story to Jondo, but I'll bet he was

somebody's tool. You know what a critter he was there. But listen now!

He's got his eye on Little Blue Flower. He's plain wild Injun, and she's

a Saint Ann's scholar. Isn't that presumption, though! She's afraid of

him, too. This country fairly teams with romance, doesn't it?"

"Bev, don't you ever take anything seriously?" I asked.

"Well, I guess I do. I found that Santan, dead loaded with jealousy,

sneaking after us in the dark to-night when I took Little Blue Flower

for a stroll. I took him seriously, and told him exactly where he'd

find me next time he was looking for me. That I'd stand him up against

La Garita and make a sieve out of him," Beverly said, carelessly.

"Beverly Clarenden, you are a fool to get that Apache's ill-will," I

cried.

"I may be, but I'm no coward," Beverly retorted. "Oh, here comes Jondo.

I've got a letter from Father Josef. Invitation to some churchly dinner,

I expect."

Beverly threw the letter into Jondo's hands and turned to leave us.

"Wait a minute!" Jondo commanded, and my cousin halted in surprise.

"When did you get this? I should have had it two hours ago," Jondo said,

sternly. "Father Josef must have waited a long time up at the church

door for his messenger to come back and bring him word from me."

Beverly frankly told him the truth, as from childhood we had learned was

the easiest way out of trouble.

Jondo's smile came back to his eyes, but his lips did not smile as he

said: "Gail, you can explain things to Bev. This is serious business,

but it had to come sooner or later. The battle is on, and we'll fight it

out. Ferdinand Ramero is determined that Eloise and his son shall be

married early to-morrow morning. The bribe to the Church is one-half of

the St. Vrain estate. The club over Eloise is the shame of some disgrace

that he holds the key to. He will stop at nothing to have his own way,

and he will stoop to any brutal means to secure it. He has a host of

fellows ready at his call to do any crime for his sake. That's how far

money and an ungovernable passion can lead a man. If I had known this

sooner, we would have acted to-night."

Beverly groaned.

"Let me go and kill that man. There ought to be a bounty on such wild

beasts," he declared.

"He'd do that for you through a Mexican dagger, or an Apache arrow, if

you got in his way," Jondo replied. "But what we must do is this: Twenty

miles south on the San Christobal Arroyo there is a lonely ranch-house

on the old Narveo estate, a forgotten place, but it is a veritable fort,

built a hundred years ago, when every house here was a fort. To-morrow

at daybreak you must start with Eloise and Sister Anita down there. I

will see Father Josef later and tell him where I have sent you. Little

Blue Flower will show you the way. It is a dangerous ride, and you must

make it as quickly and as silently as possible. A bullet from some

little cañon could find you easily if Ramero should know your trail.

Will you go?"

There was no need for the question as Jondo well knew, but his face was

bright with courage and hope, and a thankfulness he could not express

shone in his eyes as he looked at us, big, stalwart, eager and unafraid.

XV

THE SANCTUARY ROCKS OF SAN CHRISTOBAL

Mark where she stands! Around her form I draw

The awful circle of our solemn church!

Set but a foot within that holy ground,

And on thy head--yea, though it wore a crown--

launch the curse of Rome.

--"RICHELIEU."

The faint rose hue of early dawn was touching the highest peaks of the

Sandia and Jemez mountain ranges, while the valley of the Rio Grande

still lay asleep under dull night shadows, when five ponies and their

riders left the door of San Miguel church and rode southward in the

slowly paling gloom. In the stillness of the hour the ponies' feet,

muffled in the sand of the way, seemed to clatter noisily, and their

trappings creaked loudly in the dead silence of the place. Little Blue

Flower, no longer in her Mexican dress, led the line. Behind her Beverly

and the white-faced nun of St. Ann's rode side by side; and behind these

came Eloise St. Vrain and myself. From the church door Jondo had watched

us until we melted into the misty shadows of the trail.

"Go carefully and fearlessly and ride hard if you must. But the

struggle will be here with me to-day, not where you are," he assured us,

when we started away.

As he turned to leave the church, an Indian rose from the shadows beyond

it and stepped before him.

"You remember me, Santan, the Apache, at Fort Bent?" he questioned.

Jondo looked keenly to be sure that his memory fitted the man before

him.

"Yes, you are Santan. You brought me a message from Father Josef once."

The Indian's face did not change by the twitch of an eyelash as he

replied.

"I would bring another message from him. He would see you an hour later

than you planned. The young riders, where shall I tell him they have

gone?"

"To the old ranch-house on the San Christobal Arroyo," Jondo replied.

The Indian smiled, and turning quickly, he disappeared up the dark

street. A sudden thrill shook Jondo.

"Father Josef said I could trust that boy entirely. Surely old Dick

Verra, part Indian himself, couldn't be mistaken. But that Apache lied

to me. I know it now; and I told him where our boys are taking Eloise. I

never made a blunder like that before. Damned fool that I am!"

He ground his teeth in anger and disgust, as he sat down in the doorway

of the church to await the coming of Ferdinand Ramero and his son,

Marcos.

Out on the trail our ponies beat off the miles with steady gait. As the

way narrowed, we struck into single file, moving silently forward under

the guidance of Little Blue Flower, now plunging into dark cañons, where

the trail was rocky and perilous, now climbing the steep sidling paths

above the open plain. Morning came swiftly over the Gloriettas. Darkness

turned to gray; shapeless masses took on distinctness; the night chill

softened to the crisp breeze of dawn. Then came the rare June day in

whose bright opening hour the crystal skies of New Mexico hung above us,

and about us lay a landscape with radiant lights on the rich green of

the mesa slopes, and gray levels atint with mother-of-pearl and gold.

The Indian pueblos were astir. Mexican faces showed now and then at the

doorways of far-scattered groups of adobe huts. Outside of these all was

silence--a motionless land full of wild, rugged beauty, and thrilling

with the spell of mystery and glamour of romance. And overbrooding all,

the spirit of the past, that made each winding trail a footpath of the

centuries; each sheer cliff a watch-tower of the ages; each wide sandy

plain, a rallying-ground for the tribes long ago gone to dust; each

narrow valley a battle-field for the death-struggle between the dusky

sovereigns of a wilderness kingdom and the pale-faced conquerors of the

coat of mail and the dominant soul. The sense of danger lessened with

distance and no knight of old Spain ever rode more proudly in the days

of chivalry than Beverly Clarenden and I rode that morning, fearing

nothing, sure of our power to protect the golden-haired girl, thrilled

by this strange flight through a land of strange scenes fraught with the

charm of daring and danger. Beverly rode forward now with Little Blue

Flower. I did not wonder at her spell over him, for she was in her own

land now, and she matched its picturesque phases with her own

picturesque racial charm.

I rode beside Eloise, forgetting, in the sweet air and glorious June

sunlight, that we were following an uncertain trail away from certain

trouble.

The white-faced nun in her somber dress, rode between, with serious

countenance and downcast eyes.

"What happened to you, Little Lees, after I left you?" I asked, as we

trotted forward toward the San Christobal valley.

"Everything, Gail," she replied, looking up at me with shy, sad eyes.

"First Ferdinand Ramero came to me with the command that I should

consent to be married this morning. By this time I would have been

Marcos' wife." She shivered as she spoke. "I can't tell you the way of

it, it was so final, so cruel, so impossible to oppose. Ferdinand's eyes

cut like steel when they look at you, and you know he will do more than

he threatens. He said the Church demanded one-half of my little fortune

and that he could give it the other half if he chose. He is as imperious

as a tyrant in his pleasanter moods; in his anger he is a maniac. I

believe he would murder Marcos if the boy got in his way, and his

threats of disgracing me were terrible."

"But what else happened?" I wanted to turn her away from her wretched

memory.

"I have not seen anybody else except Little Blue Flower. She has an

Indian admirer who is Ferdinand's tool and spy. He let her come in to

see me late last night or I should not have been here now. I had almost

given up when she brought me word that you and Beverly would meet me at

the church at daylight. I have not slept since. What will be the end of

this day's work? Isn't there safety for me somewhere?" The sight of the

fair, sad face with the hunted look in the dark eyes cut me to the soul.

"Jondo said last night that the battle was on and he would fight it out

in Santa Fé to-day. It is our work to go where the Hopi blossom leads

us, and Bev Clarenden and I will not let anything happen to you."

I meant what I said, and my heart is always young when I recall that

morning ride toward the San Christobal Arroyo and my abounding vigor and

confidence in my courage and my powers.

Our trail ran into a narrow plain now where a yellow band marked the way

of the San Christobal River toward the Rio Grande. On either hand tall

cliffs, huge weather-worn points of rock, and steep slopes, spotted with

evergreen shrubs, bordered the river's course. The silent bigness of

every feature of the landscape and the beauty of the June day in the

June time of our lives, and our sense of security in having escaped the

shadows and strife in Santa Fé, all combined to make us free-spirited.

Only Sister Anita rode, alert and sorrowful-faced, between Beverly and

the gaily-robed Indian girl, and myself with Eloise, the beautiful.

As we rounded a bend in the narrow valley, Little Blue Flower halted us,

and pointing to an old half-ruined rock structure beside the stream, she

said:

"See, yonder is the chapel where Father Josef comes sometimes to pray

for the souls of the Hopi people. The house we go to find is farther up

a cañon over there."

"I remember the place," Eloise declared. "Father Josef brought me here

once and left me awhile. I wasn't afraid, although I was alone, for he

told me I was always safe in a church. But I was never allowed to come

back again."

Sister Anita crossed herself and, glancing over her shoulder, gave a

sharp cry of alarm. We turned about to see a group, of horsemen dashing

madly up the trail behind us. The wind in their faces blew back the

great cloud of dust made by their horses hoofs, hiding their number and

the way behind them. Their steeds were wet with foam, but their riders

spurred them on with merciless fury. In the forefront Ferdinand Ramero's

tall form, towering above the small statured evil-faced Mexican band he

was leading, was outlined against the dust-cloud following them, and I

caught the glint of light on his drawn revolver.

"Ride! Ride like the devil!" Beverly shouted.

At the same time he and the Hopi girl whirled out and, letting us pass,

fell in as a rear guard between us and our pursuers. And the race was

on.

Jondo had said the lonely ranch-house whither we were tending was as

strong as a fort. Surely it could not be far away, and our ponies were

not spent with hard riding. Before us the valley narrowed slightly, and

on its rim jagged rock cliffs rose through three hundred feet of

earthquake-burst, volcanic-tossed confusion to the high tableland

beyond.

As we strained forward, half a dozen Mexican horsemen suddenly appeared

on the trail before us to cut off our advance. Down between us and the

new enemy stood the old stone chapel, like the shadow of a great rock in

a weary land, where for two hundred long years it had set up an altar to

the Most High on this lonely savage plain.

"The chapel! The chapel! We must run to that now," cried Sister Anita.

Her long veil was streaming back in the wind, and her rosary and

crucifix beating about her shoulders with the hard riding, but her white

face was brave with a divine trust. Yet even as she urged us I saw how

imposible was her plea, for the men in front were already nearer

to the place than we were. At the same time a pony dashed up beside me,

and Little Blue Flower's voice rang in my ears.

"The rocks! Climb up and hide in the rocks!" She dropped back on one

side of Beverly, with Sister Anita on the other, guarding our rear. As

I turned our flight toward the cliff, I caught sight of an Indian in a

wedge of rock just across the river, and I heard the singing flight of

an arrow behind me, followed almost instantly by another arrow. I looked

back to see Sister Anita's pony staggering and rearing in agony, with

Little Blue Flower trying vainly to catch its bridle-rein, and Sister

Anita, clutching wildly at her rosary, a great stream of blood flowing

from an arrow wound in her neck.

Men think swiftly in moments like these. The impulse to halt, and the

duty to press on for the protection of the girl beside me, holding me in

doubt. Instantly I saw the dark crew, with Ferdinand Ramero leading

fiercely forward, almost upon us, and I heard Beverly Clarenden's voice

filling the valley--"Run, Gail, run! You can beat 'em up there."

It was a cry of insistences and assurances and power, and withal there

was that minor tone of sympathy which had sounded in the boy's defiant

voice long ago in the gray-black shadows below Pawnee Rock, when his

chivalric soul had been stirred by the cruel wrongs of Little Blue

Flower and he had cried:

"Uncle Esmond, let's take her, and take our chances."

I knew in a flash that the three behind us were cut off, and Eloise St.

Vrain and I pressed on alone. We crossed the narrow strip of rising

ground to where the first rocks lay as they had fallen from the cliff

above, split off by some titanic agony of nature. Up and up we went, our

ponies stumbling now and then, but almost as surefooted as men, as they

climbed the narrow way. Now the rocks hid us from the plain as we crept

sturdily through narrow crevices, and now we clambered up an open path

where nothing concealed our way. But higher still and higher, foot, by

foot we pressed, while with oath and growl behind us came our pursuers.

At last we could ride no farther, and the miracle was that our ponies

could have climbed so far. Above us huge slabs of stone, by some

internal cataclysm hurled into fragments of unguessed tons of weight,

seemed poised in air, about to topple down upon the plain below. Between

these wild, irregular masses a narrow footing zigzagged upward to still

other wild, irregular masses, a footing of long leaps in cramped spaces

between sharp edges of upright clefts, all gigantic, unbending, now

shielding by their immense angles, now standing sheer and stark before

us, casting no shadows to cover us from the great white glare of the

New-Mexican day.

I have said no man knows where his mind will run in moments of peril. As

we left our ponies and clambered up and up in hope of safety somewhere,

the face of the rocks cut and carved by the rude stone tools of a race

long perished, seemed to hold groups of living things staring at us and

pointing the way. And there was no end to these crude pictographs. Over

and over and over--the human hand, the track of the little road-runner

bird, the plumed serpent coiled or in waving line, the human form with

the square body and round head, with staring circles for eyes and mouth,

and straight-line limbs.

We were fleeing for safety through the sacred aisles of a people God had

made; and when they served His purpose no longer, they had perished. I

did not think of them so that morning. I thought only of some

hiding-place, some inaccessible point where nothing could reach the girl

I must protect. But these crawling serpents, cut in the rock surfaces,

crawled on and on. These human hands, poor detached hands, were lifted

up in mute token of what had gone before. These two-eyed, one-mouthed

circles on heads fast to body-boxes, from which waved tentacle limbs,

jigged by us, to give place to other coiled or crawling serpents and

their companion carvings, with the track of the swift road-runner

skipping by us everywhere.

At last, with bleeding hands and torn clothing, we stood on a level rock

like a tiny mesa set out from the high summit of the cliff.

Eloise sat down at my feet as I looked back eagerly over the precipitous

way we had come, and watched the band of Mexicans less rapidly swarming

up the same steep, devious trail.

Three hundred feet below us lay the plain with the thin current of the

San Christobal River sparkling here and there in the sunlight. The black

spot on the trail that scarcely moved must be Beverly and Little Blue

Flower with Sister Anita. No, there was only the Indian girl there, and

something moving in and out of the shadow near them. I could not see for

the intervening rocks.

"Gail! Gail! You will not let them take you. You will not leave me,"

Eloise moaned.

And I was one against a dozen. I stooped to where she sat and gently

lifted her limp white hand, saying:

"Eloise, I was on a rock like this a night and a day alone on the

prairie. I could not move nor cry out. But something inside told me to

'hold fast'--the old law of the trail. You must do that with me now."

A shout broke over the valley and the rocks about us seemed suddenly to

grow men, as if every pictograph of the old stone age had become a

sentient thing, a being with a Mexican dress, and the soul of a devil.

Just across a narrow chasm, a little below us, Ferdinand Ramero stood in

all the insolence of a conqueror, with a smile that showed his white

teeth, and in his steely eyes was the glitter of a snake about to

spring.

"You have given us a hard race. By Jove, you rode magnificently and

climbed heroically. I admire you for it. It is fine to bring down game

like you, Clarenden. You have your uncle's spirit, and a six-foot body

that dwarfs his short stature. And we come as gentlemen only, if we can

deal with a gentleman. It wasn't our men who struck your nun down there.

But if you, young man, dare to show one ounce of fighting spirit now,

behind you on the rocks--don't look--as I lift my hand are my good

friends who will put a bullet into the brain beneath that golden hair,

and you will follow. Being a game-cock cannot help you now. It will only

hasten things. Deliver that girl to me at once, or my men will close in

upon you and no power on earth can save you."

Eloise had sprung to her feet and stood beside me, and both of us knew

the helplessness of our plight. A startling picture it must have been,

and one the cliffs above the San Christobal will hardly see again: the

blue June sky arched overhead, unscarred by a single cloud-fleck, the

yellow plain winding between the high picturesque cliffs, where silence

broods all through the long hours of the sunny day; the pictured rocks

with their furnace-blackened faces white--outlined with the story of the

dim beginnings of human strivings. And standing alone and defenseless on

the little table of stone, as if for sacrifice, the tall, stalwart young

plainsman and the beautiful girl with her golden hair in waving masses

about her uncovered head, her sweet face white as the face of the dying

nun beside the sandy arroyo below us, her big dark eyes full of a

strange fire.

"I order you to close in and take these two at once." The imperious

command rang out, and the rocks across the valley must have echoed its

haughty tone.

"And I order you to halt."

The voice of Father Josef, clear and rich and powerful, burst upon the

silence like cathedral music on the still midnight air. The priest's

tall form rose up on a great mass of rock across the cleft before

us--Father Josef with bared head and flashing eyes and a physique of

power.

Ferdinand Ramero turned like a lion at bay. "You are one man. My force

number a full dozen. Move on," he ordered.

Again the voice of Father Josef ruled the listening ears.

"Since the days of old the Church has had the power to guard all that

come within the shelter of the holy sanctuary. And to the Church of God

was given also long ago the might to protect, by sanctuary privilege,

the needy and the defenseless. Ferdinand Ramero, note that little table

of rock where those two stand helpless in your grasp. Around them now I

throw, as I have power to throw, the sacred circle of our Holy Church in

sanctuary shelter. Who dares to step inside it will be accursed in the

sight of God."

Never, never will I live through another moment like to that, nor see

the power of the Unseen rule things that are seen with such unbreakable

strength.

The Mexicans dropped to their knees in humble prayer, and Ferdinand

Ramero seemed turned to a man of stone. A hand was gently laid upon my

arm and Jondo and Rex Krane stood beside us. A voice far off was

sounding in my ears.

"Go back to your homes and meet me at the church to-morrow night. You,

Ferdinand Ramero, go now to the chapel yonder and wait until I come."

What happened next is lost in misty waves of forgetfulness.

XVI

FINISHING TOUCHES

"_Yet there be certain times in a young man's life when through

great sorrow or sin all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so

that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of

manhood."_

--KIPLING.

The heat of midday was tempered by a light breeze up the San Christobal

Valley, and there was not a single cloud in the June skies to throw a

softening shadow on the yellow plain. A little group of Mexicans, riding

northward with sullen faces, urged on their jaded ponies viciously as

they thought of the gold that was to have been paid them for this

morning's work, and of the gold that to-morrow night must go to pay the

priest who should shrive them; and they had nothing gained wherewith to

pay. Their leader, whom they had served, had been trapped in his own

game, and they felt themselves abused and deceived.

Down by the brown sands of the river Father Josef waited at the door of

the half-ruined little stone chapel for the strange group coming slowly

toward him: Ferdinand Ramero, riding like a captured but unconquered

king, his head erect, his flashing eyes seeing nobody; Jondo who could

make the shabbiest piece of horseflesh take on grace when he mounted it,

his tanned cheek flushed, and the spirit of supreme sacrifice looking

out through his dark-blue eyes; Eloise, drooping like a white flower,

but brave of spirit now, sure that her grief and anxiety would be lifted

somehow. I rode beside her, glad to catch the faint smile in her eyes

when she looked at me. And last of all, Rex Krane, with the same old

Yankee spirit, quick to help a fellow-man and oblivious to personal

danger. So we all came to the chapel, but at the door Rex wheeled and

rode away, muttering, as he passed me:

"I've got business to look after, and not a darned thing to confess."

And Beverly! He was not with us.

When Rex Krane told his bride good-by up in the Clarenden home on the

Missouri bluff, Mat had whispered one last request:

"Look after Bev. He never sees danger for himself, nor takes anything

seriously, least of all an enemy, whom he will befriend, and make a joke

of it."

And so it happened that Rex had stayed behind to care for Beverly's

arrow wound when Bill Banney had gone out with Jondo on the Kiowa trail

to search for me this side of Pawnee Rock.

So also it happened that Rex had strolled down from Fort Marcy the night

before, in time to see Beverly and the girl in the Mexican dress

loitering along the brown front of La Garita. And his keen eyes had

caught sight of Santan crouching in an angle of the wall, watching them.

"Indians and Mexes don't mix a lot. And Bev oughtn't mix with either

one," Rex commented. "I'll line the boy up for review to-morrow, so Mat

won't say I've neglected him."

But the Yankee took the precaution to follow the trail to the Indian's

possible abiding-place on the outskirts of Santa Fé. And it was Rex who

most aided Jondo in finding that the Indian had gone with Ramero's men

northward.

"That fellow is Santan, of Fort Bent, Rex," Jondo said.

"Yes, you thought he was _Santa_ and I took him for _Satan_ then. We

missed out on which to knock out of him. Bev won't care nothin' about

his name. He will knock hell out of him if he gets in that Clarenden

boy's way," Rex had replied.

At the chapel door now the Yankee turned away and rode down the trail

toward the little angle where an Indian arrow had whizzed at our party

an hour before.

In the shadow of a fallen mass of rock below the cliff Little Blue

Flower had spread her blanket, with Beverly's coat tucked under it in a

roll for a pillow, and now she sat beside the dying nun, holding the

crucifix to Sister Anita's lips. The Indian girl's hands were

blood-stained and the nun's black veil and gown were disheveled, and her

white head-dress and coif were soaked with gore. But her white face was

full of peace as the light faded from her eyes.

And Beverly! The boy forgot the rest of the world when one of the

Apache's arrows struck down the pony and the other pierced Sister

Anita's neck. Tenderly as a mother would lift a babe he quickly carried

the stricken woman to the shelter of the rock, and with one glance at

her he turned away.

"You can do all that she needs done for her. Give her her cross to

hold," he said, gently, to Little Blue Flower.

Then he sprang up and dashed across the river, splashing the bright

waters as he leaped to the farther side where Santan stood concealed,

waiting for the return of Ramero's Mexicans.

At the sound of Beverly's feet he leaped to the open just in time to

meet Beverly's fist square between the eyes.

"Take that, you dirty dog, to shoot down an innocent nun. And that!"

Beverly followed his first blow with another.

The Apache, who had reeled back with the weight of the boy's iron fist,

was too quick for the second thrust, struggling to get hold of his

arrows and his scalping-knife. But the space was too narrow and Beverly

was upon him with a shout.

"I told you I'd make a sieve or you the next time you tried to see me,

and I'm going to do it."

He seized the Indian's knife and flung it clear into the river, where

it stuck upright in the sands of the bed, parting the little stream of

water gurgling against it; and with a powerful grip on the Apache's

shoulders he wrenched the arrows from their place and tramped on them

with his heavy boot.

The Indian's surprise and submission were gone in a flash, and the two

clinched in combat.

On the one hand, jealousy, the inherited hatred of a mistreated race,

the savage instinct, a gloating joy in brute strife, blood-lust, and a

dogged will to trample in the dirt the man who made the sun shine black

for the Apache. On the other hand, a mad rage, a sense of insult, a

righteous greed for vengeance for a cruel deed against an innocent

woman, and all the superiority of a dominant people. The one would

conquer a powerful enemy, the other would exterminate a despicable and

dangerous pest.

Back and forth across the narrow space hidden from the trail by fallen

rock they threshed like beasts of prey. The Apache had the swiftness of

the snake, his muscles were like steel springs, and there was no rule of

honorable warfare in his code. He bit and clawed and pinched and

scratched and choked and wrenched, with the grim face and burning eyes

of a murderer. But the Saxon youth, slower of motion, heavier of bone

and muscle, with a grip like iron and a stony endurance, with pride in a

conquest by sheer clean skill, and with a purpose, not to take life, but

to humble and avenge, hammered back blow for blow; and there was

nothing for many minutes to show which was offensive and which

defensive.

As the struggle raged on, the one grew more furious and the other more

self-confident.

"Oh, I'll make you eat dust yet!" Beverly cried, as Santan in triumph

flung him backward and sprang upon his prostrate form.

They clinched again, and with a mighty surge of strength my cousin

lifted himself, and the Indian with him, and in the next fall Beverly

had his antagonist gripped and helpless.

"I can choke you out now as easy as you shot that arrow. Say your

prayers." He fairly growled out the words.

"I didn't aim at her," the Apache half whined, half boasted. "I wanted

you."

At that moment Beverly, spent, bruised, and bleeding with fighting and

surcharged with the lust of combat, felt all the instinct of murder

urging him on to utterly destroy a poison-fanged foe to humanity. At

Santan's words he paused and, flinging back the hair from his forehead,

he caught his breath and his better self in the same heart-beat. And the

instinct of the gentleman--he was Esmond Clarenden's brother's son--held

the destroying hand.

"You aimed at me! Well, learn your lesson on that right now. Promise

never to play the fool that way again. Promise the everlasting God's

truth, or here you go."

The boy's clutch tightened on Santan's throat. "By all that's holy,

you'll go to your happy hunting-ground _right now, unless you do_!" He

growled out the words, and his blazing eyes glared threateningly at his

fallen enemy.

"I promise!" Santan muttered, gasping for breath.

"You didn't mean to kill the nun? Then you'll go with me and ask her to

forgive you before she dies. You will. You needn't try to get away from

me. I let you thrash your strength out before we came to this

settlement. Be still!" Beverly commanded, as Santan made a mad effort to

release himself.

"Hurry up, and remember she is dying. Go softly and speak gently, or by

the God of heaven, you'll go with her to the Judgment Seat to answer for

that deed right now!"

Slowly the two rose. Their clothes were torn, their hair disheveled, the

ground at their feet was red with their blood. They were as bitter, as

distrustful now as when their struggle began. For brute force never

conquers anything. It can only hold in check by fear of its power to

destroy the body. Above the iron fist of the fighter, and the sword and

cannon of the soldier, stands the risen Christ who carried his own cross

up Mount Calvary--and "there they crucified him."

The two young men, spent with their struggle, their faces stained with

dirt and bloody sweat, crossed the river and sought the shadowy place

where Little Blue Flower sat beside Sister Anita. Twice Santan tried to

escape, and twice Beverly brought him quickly to his place. It must

have been here that I caught sight of them from the rock above.

"One more move like that and the ghost of Sister Anita will walk behind

you on every trail you follow as long as your flat feet hit the earth,"

Beverly declared.

"All Indians are afraid of ghosts and I was just too tired to fight any

more," he said to me afterward when he told me the story of that hour by

the San Christobal River.

Sister Anita lay with wide-open eyes, her hands moving feebly as she

clutched at her crucifix. Her hour was almost spent.

Santan stood motionless before her, as Beverly with a grip on his arm

said, firmly:

"Tell her you did not aim at her, and ask her to forgive you. It will

help to save your own soul sometime, maybe."

Santan looked at Little Blue Flower. But she gave no heed to him as she

put the dropped crucifix into the weakening fingers. Murder, as such, is

as horrifying to the gentle Hopi tribe as it is sport for the cruel

Apache.

Beverly loosed his hold now.

"I did not want to hurt you. Forgive me!" Santan said, slowly, as though

each word were plucked from him by red-hot pincers.

Sister Anita heard and turned her eyes.

"Kneel down and tell her again," Beverly said, more gently.

The Apache dropped on his knees beside the dying woman and repeated his

words. Sister Anita smiled sweetly.

"Heaven will forgive you even as I do," she murmured, and closed her

eyes.

"Go softly. This is sacred ground," my cousin said.

The Indian rose and passed silently down the trail, leaving Little Blue

Flower and Beverly Clarenden together with the dead. At the stream he

paused and pulled his knife from the sands beneath the trickling waters,

and then went on his way.

But an Indian never forgets.

Rex Krane, who had hurried hither from the chapel, closed the eyes and

folded the thin hands of the martyred woman, and sent Beverly forward

for help to dispose of the garment of clay that had been Sister Anita.

From that day something manly and serious came into Beverly Clarenden's

face to stay, but his sense of humor and his fearlessness were

unchanged.

That was a solemn hour in the shadow of the rock down in that yellow

valley, but beautiful in its forgiving triumph. We who had gathered in

the dimly lighted chapel had an hour more solemn for that it was made up

of such dramatic minutes as change the trend of life-trails for all the

years to come.

The chapel was very old. They tell me that only a broken portion of the

circular wall about the altar stands there to-day, a lonely monument to

some holy padre's faith and courage and sacrifice in the forgotten

years when, in far Hesperia, men dreamed of a Quivera and found only a

Calvary.

It may be that I, Gail Clarenden, was also changed as I listened to the

deliberations of that day; that something of youth gave place for the

stronger manhood that should stay me through the years that came after.

Eloise sat where I could see her face. The pink bloom had come back to

it, and the golden hair, disordered by our wild ride and rough climb

among the pictured rocks of the cliff, curled carelessly on her white

brow and rippled about her shapely head. I used to wonder what setting

fitted her beauty best--why wonder that about any beautiful woman?--but

the gracious loveliness of this woman was never more appealing to me

than in the soft light and sacred atmosphere of the church.

Father Josef's first thought was for her, but he brought water and

coarse linen towels, so that, refreshed and clean-faced, we came in to

his presence.

"Eloise," his voice was deep and sweet, "so long as you were a child I

tried to protect and direct you. Now that you are a woman, you must

still be protected, but you must live your own life and choose for

yourself. You must meet sorrow and not be crushed by it. You must take

up your cross and bear it. It is for this that I have called you back to

New Mexico at this time. But remember, my daughter, that life is not

given to us for defeat, but for victory; not for tears, but for smiles;

not for idle cringing safety, but for brave and joyous struggle."

I thought of Dick Verra, the college man, whose own young years were

full of hope and ambition, whose love for a woman had brought him to the

priesthood, but as I caught the rich tones of Father Josef's voice,

somehow, to me, he stood for success, not failure.

Eloise bowed her head and listened.

"You must no longer be threatened with the loss of your own heritage,

nor coerced into a marriage for which the Church has been offered a

bribe to help to accomplish. Blood money purifies no altars nor extends

the limits of the Kingdom of the Christ. Your property is your own to

use for the holy purposes of a goodly life wherever your days may lead

you; and whatever the civil law may grant of power to control it for

you, you shall no longer be harassed or annoyed. The Church demands that

it shall henceforth be yours."

Father Josef's dark eyes were full of fire as he turned to Ferdinand

Ramero.

"You will now relinquish all claim upon the control of this estate,

whose revenue made your father and yourself to be accounted rich, and

upon which your son has been allowed to build up a life expectation; and

though on account of it, you go forth a poor man in wordly goods, you

may go out rich in the blessing of restoration and repentance."

Ferdinand Ramero's steel eyes were fixed like the eyes of a snake on the

holy man's face. Restoration and repentance do not belong behind eyes

like that.

"I can fight you in the courts. You and your Church may go to the

devil;" he seemed to hiss rather than to speak these words.

"We do go to him every day to bring back souls like yours," Father

Josef's voice was calm. "I have waited a long time for you to repent.

You can go to the courts, but you will not do it. For the sake of your

wife, Gloria Ramero, and Felix Narveo, her brother, we do not move

against you, and you dare not move for yourself, because your own record

will not bear the light of legal investigation."

Ferdinand Ramero sprang up, the blaze of passion, uncontrolled through

all his years, bursting forth in the tragedy of the hour. Eloise was

right. In his anger he was a maniac.

"You dare to threaten me! You pen me in a corner to stab me to death!

You hold disgrace and miserable poverty over my head, and cant of

restoration and repentance! Not until here you name each thing that you

count against me, and I have met them point by point, will I restore. I

never will repent!"

In the vehemence of anger, Ramero was the embodiment of the dramatic

force of unrestraint, and withal he was handsome, with a controlling

magnetism even in his hour of downfall.

Jondo had said that Father Josef had somewhere back a strain of Indian

blood in his veins. It must have been this that gave the fiber of self

control to his countenance as he looked with pitying eyes at Jondo and

Eloise St. Vrain.

"The hour is struck," he said, sadly. "And you shall hear your record,

point by point, because you ask it now. First: you have retained,

controlled, misused, and at last embezzled the fortune of Theron St.

Vrain, as it was retained, controlled, misused, and embezzled by your

father, Henry Ramer, in his lifetime. Any case in civil courts must show

how the heritage of Eloise St. Vrain, heir to Theron St. Vrain at the

death of her mother--"

"Not until the death of her mother--" Ferdinand Ramero broke in,

hoarsely.

For the first time to-day the priest's cheek paled, but his voice was

unbroken as he continued:

"I would have been kinder for your own sake. You desire otherwise. Yes,

only after the death of Mary Marchland St. Vrain could you dictate

concerning her daughter's affairs, with most questionable legality even

then. Mary Marchland St. Vrain is not dead."

The chapel was as silent as the grave. My heart stood still. Before me

was Jondo, big, strong, self-controlled, inured to the tragic deeds of

the epic years of the West. No pen of mine will ever make the picture of

Jondo's face at these words of Father Josef.

Eloise turned deathly pale, and her dark eyes opened wide, seeing

nothing. It was not I who comforted her, but Jondo, who put his strong

arm about her, and she leaned against his shoulder. Father and daughter

in spirit, stricken to the heart.

"For many years she has lived in that lonely ranch-house on the Narveo

grant in the little cañon up the San Christobal Arroyo. When the fever

left her with memory darkened forever, you recorded her as dead. But

your wife, Gloria Ramero, spared no pains to make her comfortable. She

has never known a want, nor lived through one unhappy hour, because she

has forgotten."

"A priest, confessor for men's inmost souls, who babbles all he knows! I

wonder that this roof does not fall on you and strike you dead before

this altar." Ferdinand Ramero's voice rose to a shout.

"It was too strongly built by one who knew men's inmost souls, and what

they needed most," Father Josef replied. "You drove me to this by your

insistence. I would have shielded you--and these."

He turned to Eloise and Jondo as he spoke.

"One more point, since you hold it ready to spring when I am through.

You stand accused of plotting for your father's murder. The evidence

still holds, and some men who rode with you to-day to seize this gentle

girl and drag her back to a marriage with your son--and save your

ill-gotten gold thereby--some of these men who will confess to me and do

penance to-morrow night, are the same men who long ago confessed to

other crimes--you can guess what they were.

"It pays well to repent before such a holy tattler as yourself."

Ramero's blue eyes burned deep as their fire was centered on the priest.

"These are the counts against you," Father Josef said in review,

ignoring the last outburst of wrath. "A life of ease and inheritance

through money not your own, nor even rightly yours to control. A

stricken woman listed with the dead, whose memory might have come

again--God knows--if but the loving touch of childish hands had long ago

been on her hands. It is years too late for all that now. A brave young

ward rescued from your direct control by Esmond Clarenden's force of

will and daring to do the right. You know that last pleading cry of Mary

Marchland's, for Jondo to protect her child, and how Clarenden, for love

of this brave man, came to New Mexico on perilous trails to take the

little Eloise from you. And lastly in this matter, the threats to force

a marriage unholy in God's sight, because no love could go with it. Your

mad chase and villainous intention to use brute force to secure your

will out yonder on the rocks above the cliff. You have debauched an

Apache boy, making him your tool and spy. You sanctioned the seizing of

a Hopi girl whose parents you permitted to be murdered, and their child

sold into slavery among foreign tribes. You have stirred up and kept

alive a feud of hatred and revenge among the Kiowa people against the

life and property of Esmond Clarenden and all who belong to him. And,

added to all these, you stand to-day a patricide in spirit, accused of

plotting for the murder of your own father. Do not these things call

for restoration and repentance?"

Ferdinand Ramero rose to his feet and stood in the aisle near the door.

His face hardened, and all the suave polish and cool concentration and

dominant magnetism fell away. What remained was the man as shaped by the

ruling passions of years, from whose control only divine power could

bring deliverance. And when he spoke there was a remorseless cruelty and

selfishness in his low, even tones.

"You have called me a plotter for my father's life--based on some lying

Mexican's love of blackmail. You do not even try to prove your charge.

The man who would have killed him was Theron St. Vrain, and his brother,

Bertrand. That Theron was disgraced by the fact you know very well, and

the blackness of it drove him to an early grave. So this young lady

here, whom I would have shielded from this stain upon her name in the

marriage to my son, may know the truth about her father. He was what

you, Father Josef, try to prove me to be."

He paused as if to gather venom for his last shaft.

"These two, Theron and Bertrand, were equally guilty, but through tricks

of their own, Theron escaped and Bertrand took the whole crime on

himself. He disappeared and paid the penalty by his death. His body was

recovered from the river and placed in an unmarked grave. Why go back to

that now? Because Bertrand St. Vrain's clothes alone on some poor

drowned unknown man were buried. Bertrand himself sits here beside his

niece, Eloise St. Vrain. John Doe to the world, the man who lives

without a name, and dares not sign a business document, a walking dead

man. I could even pity him if he were real. But who can pity nothing?"

A look of defiance came into the man's glittering eyes as he took one

step nearer to the door and continued:

"Esmond Clarenden drove me out of the United States with threats of

implicating me in the death of my father, and I knew his power and

brutal daring to do anything he chose to do. It was but his wish to have

revenge for this nameless thing--"

The scorn of Ramero's eyes and voice as he looked at Jondo were

withering.

"And this thing keeps me here by threats of attacks, even when he knows

that by such attacks he will reveal himself. It has been a grim game."

Something of a grin showed all of the man's fine teeth. "A grim game,

and never played to a finish till now. I leave it to you, Father Josef,

to judge who has been the stronger and who comes out of it victor. I

make restoration--of what? I leave the St. Vrain money that I have

guarded for Eloise, the daughter of the man who killed, or helped to

kill, my father. You can control it now, among you: Clarenden, already

rich; your Church, notorious in its robbery of the poor by enriching its

coffers; or this uncle here, who is dead and buried in an unknown grave.

That is all the restoration I can make. Repentance, I do not know what

that word means. Keep it for the poor devils you will gather in

to-morrow night to be shriven. They need it. I do not."

He turned and strode out of the church and, mounting his horse, rode

like a madman up the yellow valley of the San Christobal. In after years

I could find no term to so well describe that last act as the words of

Beverly Clarenden, who came to the chapel just in time to hear Ferdinand

Ramero's closing declaration, and to see his black scowl and scornful

air, as, in a royal madness, he defied the power of man and denounced

the all-pitying love that is big enough for the most sinful.

"It was Paradise lost," Beverly declared, "and Satan falling clear to

hell before the Archangel's flaming sword. Only he went east and the

real Satan dropped down to his place. But they will meet up somewhere,

Ramero and the real one, and not be able to tell each other apart."

And Jondo. My boyhood idol, brave, gentle, unselfish, able everywhere!

Jondo, who had kept my toddling feet from stumbling, who had taught me

to ride and swim and shoot, who had made me wise in plains lore, and

manly and clean among the rough and vulgar things of the Missouri

frontier. Jondo, whose big, cool hand had touched my feverish face,

whose deep blue eyes had looked love into my eyes when I lay dying on

Pawnee Rock! A man without a name! A murderer who had by a trick escaped

the law, and must walk evermore unknown among his fellow-men! Something

went out of my life as I looked at him. The boy in me was burned and

seared away, and only the man-to-be, was left.

He offered no word of defense from the accusation against him, nor made

a plea of innocence, but sat looking straight at Father Josef, who

looked at him as if expecting nothing. And as they gazed into each

other's eyes, a something strong and beautiful swept the face of each. I

could not understand it, and I was young. My lifetime hero had turned to

nothingness before my eyes. The world was full of evil. I hated it and

all that in it was, my trusting, foolish, short-sighted self most of

all.

But Eloise--the heart of woman is past understanding--Eloise turned to

the man beside her and, putting both arms around his neck, she pressed

one fair cheek against his brown bearded one, and kissed him gently on

the forehead. Then turning to Father Josef, no longer the dependent,

clinging maiden, but the loving woman, strong and sure of will, she

said:

"I must go to my mother. So long as she lives I will never leave her

again."

She did not even look at me, nor speak a word of farewell, as if I were

the murderer instead of that man, Jondo, whom she had kissed.

I saw her ride away, with Little Blue Flower beside her. I saw the green

mesa, the red cliffs above the growing things, the glitter of the San

Christobal water on yellow sands, the level plain where the narrow white

trail crept far away toward Gloria Narveo's lonely ranch-house, strong

as a fort built a hundred years ago, in a little cañon of the valley. I

saw a young, graceful figure on horseback, and the glint of sunlight on

golden hair. But the rider did not turn her head and I could not get one

glance of those beautiful dark eyes. A great mass of rock hid the line

of the trail, and the two, Eloise and Little Blue Flower, rounded the

angle and rode on out of my sight.

I helped to dig open the curly mesquite and to shovel out the sand. I

heard the burial service, and saw a rudely coffined form lowered into an

open grave. I saw Rex Krane at the head, and Jondo at the foot, and

Beverly's bleeding hands as he scraped the loose earth back and heaped

it over that which had been called Sister Anita; I heard Father Josef's

voice of music repeating the "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust." And

then we turned away and left the spot, as men turn every day to the

common affairs of life.

Four days later Little Blue Flower came to me as I, still numb and cold

and blankly unthinking, sat beside Fort Marcy and looked out with

unseeing eyes at the glory of a New-Mexican sunset.

"I come from Eloise." The sadness of her face and voice even the

Indian's self-control could not conceal.

"She is sad, but brave, and her mother loves her and calls her 'Little

One.' She will never grow up to her mother. But"--Little Blue Flower's

voice faltered and she gazed out at the far Sandia peaks wrapped in the

rich purple folds of twilight, with the scarlet of the afterglow beyond

them--"Eloise loves Beverly. She will always love him. Heaven meant him

for her." There were some other broken sentences, but I did not grasp

them clearly then.

The world was full of gray shadows. The finishing touches had been put

on life for me. I looked out at the dying glow in the west, and wondered

vaguely if the sun would ever cross the Gloriettas again, or ever the

Sangre-de-Christo grow radiant with the scarlet stain of that ineffable

beauty that uplifts and purifies the soul of him who looks on it.

XVII

SWEET AND BITTER WATERS

Trust me, it is something to be cast

Face to face with one's self at last,

To be taken out of the fuss and strife,

The endless clatter of plate and knife,

The bore of books, and the bores of the street,

And to be set down on one's own two feet

So nigh to the great warm heart of God,

You almost seem to feel it beat

Down from the sunshine, and up from the sod.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

My hair is very white now, and my fingers hold a pen more easily than

they could hold the ox-goad or the rifle, and mine to-day is all the

backward look. Which look is evermore a satisfying thing because it

takes in all of life behind in its true proportion, where the forward

look of youth sees only what comes next and nothing more. And looking

back to-day it seems that, of the many times I walked the long miles of

that old Santa Fe Trail, no journey over it stands out quite so

clear-cut in my memory as the home trip after I had watched the going

away of Eloise, and witnessed the flight of Ferdinand Ramero, and

listened to the story of Jondo's life.

When Little Blue Flower left me sitting beside Fort Marcy's wall my

mind went back in swift review over the flight of days since Beverly

Clarenden and I had come from Cincinnati. I recalled the first meeting

of Eloise with my cousin. How easily they had renewed acquaintance. I

had been surprised and embarrassed and awkward when I found her and

Little Blue Flower down by the Flat Rock below St. Ann's, in the Moon of

the Peach Blossom. I remembered how I had monopolized all of her time in

the days that followed, leaving good-natured Bev to look after the

little Indian girl who never really seemed like an Indian to him. And

keen-piercing as an arrow came now the memory of that midnight hour when

I had seen the two in the little side porch of the Clarenden home, and

again I heard the sorrowful words:

"Oh, Beverly, it breaks my heart."

Eloise had just seen Beverly kiss Little Blue Flower in the shadows of

the porch. And all the while, good-hearted, generous boy that he was, he

had never tried to push his suit with her, had made her love him more,

no doubt, by letting me have full command of all of her time, while he

forgot himself in showing courtesy to the Indian girl, because Bev was

first of all a gentleman. I thought of that dear hour in the church of

San Miguel. Of course, Eloise was glad to find me there--poor, hunted,

frightened child! She would have been as glad, no doubt, to have found

big Bill Banney or Rex Krane, and I had thought her eyes held something

just for me that night. She had not seen Beverly at the chapel beside

the San Christobal River, and to me she had not given even a parting

glance when she went away. If she had cared for me at all she would not

have left me so. And I had climbed the tortuous trail with her and stood

beside her in the zone of sanctuary safety that Father Josef had thrown

about us two.

These things were clear enough to me, but when I tried to think again of

all that Little Blue Flower had said an hour ago my mind went numb:

"Her mother knew her, but only as the little Eloise long lost and never

missed till now. The mother, too, was very beautiful, and young in face,

and child-like in her helplessness. The lonely ranch-house, old, and

strong as a fort, girt round by tall cañon walls, nestled in a grassy

open place; and not a comfort had been denied the woman there. For

Gloria Ramero, Ferdinand's wife, had governed that. And Eloise had

entered there to stay. This much was clear enough. But that which

followed seemed to twist and writhe about in my mind with only one thing

sure--Eloise loved Beverly, would always love him. And he could not love

any one else. He could be kind to any girl, but he would not be happy.

Some day when he was older--a real man--then he would long for the girl

of his heart and his own choice, and he would find her and love her,

too, and she would love him and those who stood between them they both

would hate. And Eloise loved Beverly. She could not send Gail any words

herself, but he would understand."

So came the Indian girl's interpretation of the case, but the conclusion

was the message meant for me. I wondered vaguely, as I sat there, if the

vision had come to Beverly years ago as it had come to me: three

men--the soldier on his cavalry mount, Jondo, the plainsman, on his big

black horse, and between the two, Esmond Clarenden, neither mounted nor

on foot, but going forward somehow, steady and sure. And beyond these

three, this side of misty mountain peaks, the cloud of golden hair, the

sweet face, with dark eyes looking into mine. I had not been a dreamer,

I had been a fool.

Through Beverly I learned the next day that Ferdinand Ramero had come

into Santa Fé late at night and had left early the next morning. Marcos

Ramero, faultlessly dressed, lounged about the gambling-halls, and

strolled through the sunny Plaza, idly and insolently, as was his

custom. But Gloria Ramero, to whom Marcos long ago ceased to be more

than coldly courteous, had left the city at once for the San Christobal

Valley, to devote herself to the care of the beautiful woman whom her

brother Felix Narveo in his college days had admired so much.

As for Jondo, years ago when we had met Father Josef out by the sandy

arroyo, he had left us to follow the good man somewhere, and had not

come back to the Exchange Hotel until nightfall. Something had come into

his face that day that never left it again. And now that something had

deepened in the glance of his eye and the firm-set mouth. It was

through that meeting with Father Josef that he had first heard of the

supposed death of Mary Marchland St. Vrain, and it was through the

priest in the chapel he had heard that she was still alive.

Neither Beverly nor Bill Banney nor Rex Krane knew what I had heard in

the church concerning Jondo's early career, and I never spoke of it to

them. But to all of us, outside of that intensified something

indefinable in his face, he was unchanged. He met my eye with the open,

frank glance with which he met the gaze of all men. His smile was no

less engaging and his manner remained the same--fearless, unsuspicious,

definite in serious affairs, good-natured and companionable in

everything. I could not read him now, by one little line, but back of

everything lay that withering, grievous thought--he was a murderer.

Heaven pity the boy when his idol falls, and if he be a dreaming

idealist the hurt is tenfold deeper.

And yet--the trail was waiting there to teach me many things, and

Jondo's words rang through the aisles of my brain:

"If you ever have a real cross, Gail, thank the Lord for the open plains

and the green prairies, and the danger stimulus of the old Santa Fé

Trail. They will seal up your wounds, and soften your hard, rebellious

heart, and make you see things big, and despise the little crooks in

your path."

Our Conestoga wagons, with their mule-teams, and the few ponies for

scout service, followed the old trail out of the valley of the Rio

Grande to the tablelands eastward, up the steep sidling way into the

passes of the Glorietta Mountains, down through lone, wind-swept cañons,

and on between wild, scarred hills, coming, at last, beyond the

picturesque ridges, snow-crowned and mesa-guarded, into the long, gray,

waterless lands of the Cimmarron country. Here we journeyed along

monotonous levels that rose and fell unnoted because of lack of

landmarks to measure by, only the broad, beaten Santa Fé Trail stretched

on unbending, unchanging, uneffaceable.

As the distance from spring to spring decreased, every drop of water

grew precious, and we pushed on, eager to reach the richer prairies of

the Arkansas Valley. Suddenly in the monotony of the way, and the

increasing calls of thirst, there came a sense of danger, the plains-old

danger of the Comanche on the Cimarron Trail. Bill Banney caught it

first--just a faint sign of one hostile track. All the next day Jondo

scouted far, coming into camp at nightfall with a grave report.

"The water-supply is failing," he told us, "and there is something wrong

out there. The Comanches are hovering near, that's certain, and there is

a single trail that doesn't look Comanche to me that I can't account

for. All we can do is to 'hold fast,'" he added, with his cheery smile

that never failed him.

That night I could not sleep, and the stars and I stared long at each

other. They were so golden and so far away. And one, as I looked,

slipped from its place and trailed wide across the sky until it

vanished, leaving a stream of golden light that lingered before my eyes.

I thought of the trail in the San Christobal Valley, and again I saw the

sunlight on golden hair as Eloise with Little Blue Flower passed out of

sight around the shoulder of a great rock beside the way. At last came

sleep, and in my dreams Eloise was beside me as she had been in the

church of San Miguel, her dark eyes looking up into mine. I knew, in my

dream, that I was dreaming and I did not want to waken. For, "Eloise

loved Beverly, would always love him." Little Blue Flower had said it.

The face was far away, this side of misty mountain peaks, and farther

still. I could see only the eyes looking at me. I wakened to see only

the stars looking at me. I slept again deeply and dreamlessly, and

wakened suddenly. We were far and away from the Apache country, but

there, for just one instant, a face came close to mine--the face of

Santan--the Apache. It vanished instantly as it had come. The night

guard passed by me and crossed the camp. The stars held firm above me. I

had had another dream. But after that I did not sleep till dawn.

The day was very hot, with the scorching breeze of the plains that sears

the very eyeballs dry. Through the dust and glare we pressed on over

long, white, monotonous miles. Hovering near us somewhere were the

Comanches--waiting; with us was burning thirst; ahead of us ran the

taunting mirage--cool, sparkling water rippling between green

banks--receding as we approached, maddening us by the suggestion of its

refreshing picture, the while we knew it was only a picture. For it is

Satan's own painting on the desert to let men know that Dante's dream is

mild compared to the real art of torment. Men and animals began to give

way under the day's burden, and we moved slowly. In times like these

Jondo stayed with the train, sending Bill Banney and Beverly scouting

ahead. That was the longest day that I ever lived on the Santa Fé Trail,

although I followed its miles many times in the best of its freighting

years.

The weary hours dragged at last toward evening, and a dozen signs in

plains lore told us that water must be near. As we topped a low swell at

the bottom of whose long slide lay the little oasis we were seeking, we

came upon Bill Banney's pony lying dead across the trail. And near it

Bill himself, with bloated face and bleared eyes, muttering

half-coherently:

"Water-hole! Poison! Don't drink!"

And then he babbled of the muddy Missouri, and the Kentucky blue grass,

and cold mountain springs in the passes of the Gloriettas, warning us

thickly of "death down there."

"Down there," beside the little spring shelved in by shale at the lower

edge of the swell, we found a tiny cairn built of clumps of sod and bits

of shale. Fastened on it was a scrap from Bill's note-book with the

words

Spring poisoned. Bev gone for water not very far on.--BILL.

So Bill had drunk the poisoned water and had tried to reach us. But for

fear he might not do it, he had scrawled this warning and left it here.

Brave Bill! How madly he had staggered round the place and threshed the

ground in agony when he tried to mount his poisoned pony, and his first

thought was for us. The plains made men see big. Jondo had told me they

could do it. Poor Bill, moaning for water now and tossing in agony in

Jondo's wagon! The Comanches had been cunning in their malice. How we

hated them as we stood looking at the waters of that poisoned spring!

Rex Krane's big, gentle hands were holding Bill's. Rex always had a

mother's heart; while Jondo read the ground with searching glance.

"We will wait here a little while. Bev will report soon, I hope. Come,

Gail," he said to me. "Here is something we will follow now."

A single trail led far away from the beaten road toward a stretch of

coarse dry yucca and loco-weeds that hid a little steep-sided draw

across the plains. At the bottom of it a man lay face downward beside a

dead pony. We scrambled down, shattering the dry earth after us as we

went. Jondo gently lifted the body and turned it face upward. It was

Ferdinand Ramero.

The big plainsman did not cry out, nor drop his hold, but his face

turned gray, and only the dying man saw the look in the blue eyes gazing

into his. Ramero tried to draw away, fear, and hate, and the old

dominant will that ruled his life, strong still in death. As he lay at

the feet of the man whose life hopes he had blasted, he expected no

mercy and asked for none.

"You have me at last. I didn't put the poison in that spring. I would

not have drunk it if I had. It was the one below I fixed for you. And

I'm in your power now. Be quick about it."

For one long minute Jondo looked down at his enemy. Then he lifted his

eyes to mine with the victory of "him that overcometh" shining in their

blue depths.

"If I could make you live, I'd do it, Fred. If you have any word to say,

be quick about it now. Your time is short."

The sweetness of that gentle voice I hear sometimes to-day in the low

notes of song-birds, and the gentle swish of refreshing summer showers.

Ferdinand Ramero lifted his cold blue eyes and looked at the man bending

over him.

"Leave me here--forgotten--"

"Not of God. His Mercy endureth forever," Jondo replied.

But there was no repentance, no softening of the hard, imperious heart.

We left him there, pulling down the loose earth from the steep sides of

the draw to cover him from all the frowning elements of the plains. And

when we went back to the waiting train Jondo reported, grimly:

"_No enemy in sight."_

We laid Bill Banney beside the poisoned spring, from whose bitter waters

he had saved our lives. So martyrs filled the unknown graves that made

the milestones of the way in the days of commerce-building on the old

Santa Fé Trail.

The next spring was not far ahead, as Bill's note had said, but the

stars were thick above us and the desolate land was full of shadows

before we reached it--a thirst-mad, heart-sore crowd trailing slowly on

through the gloom of the night.

Beverly was waiting for us and the refreshing moisture of the air above

a spring seemed about him.

"I thought you'd never come. Where's Bill? There's water here. I made

the spring myself," he shouted, as we came near.

The spring that he had digged for us was in the sandy bed of a dry

stream, with low, earth-banks on either side. It was full of water,

hardly clear, but plentiful, and slowly washing out a bigger pool for

itself as it seeped forth.

"There is poison in the real spring down there." Beverly pointed toward

the diminished fountain we had expected to find. "I've worked since noon

at this."

We drank, and life came back to us. We pitched camp, and then listened

to Beverly's story of the sweet and bitter waters of the trail that day.

And all the while it seemed as if Bill Banney was just out of sight and

might come galloping in at any moment.

"You know what happened up the trail," my cousin said, sadly. "Bill was

ahead of me and he drank first, and galloped back to warn me and beg me

to come on for water. I thought I could get down here and take some

water back to Bill in time. It's all shale up there. No place to dig

above, nor below, even if one dared to dig below that poison. But I

found a dead coyote that had just left here, and all springs began to

look Comanche to me. I lariated my pony and crept down under the bank

there to think and rest. Everything went poison-spotted before my eyes."

"Where's your pony now, Bev?" Jondo asked.

"I don't know sure, but I expect he is about going over the Raton Pass

by this time," Beverly replied. "Down there things seemed to swim around

me like water everywhere and I knew I'd got to stir. Just then an Indian

came slipping up from somewhere to the spring to drink. He didn't look

right to me at all, but I couldn't sit still and see him kill himself.

If he needed killing I could have done it for him, for he never saw me.

Just as he stooped I saw his face. It was that Apache--Santan--the

wander-foot, for I never heard of an Apache getting so far from the

mountains. I ought to have kept still, Jondo"--Beverly's ready smile

came to his face--"but I'd made that fellow swear he'd let me eternally

alone when we had our little fracas up by the San Christobal Arroyo, so

something like conscience, mean as the stomach-ache, made me call out:

"'Don't drink there; it's poison.'

"He stopped and stared at me a minute, or ten minutes--I didn't count

time on him--and then he said, slow-like:

"'It's the spring west that is poisoned. I put it there for you. You

will not see your men again. They will drink and die. Who put this

poison here?'

"'Lord knows. I didn't,' I told him. 'Two of you carrying poison are two

too many for the Cimarron country.'

"And I hadn't any more conscience after that, but I was faint and slow,

and my aim was bad for eels. He could have fixed me right then, but for

some reason he didn't."

Beverly's face grew sad.

"He made six jumps six ways, and caught my pony's lariat. I can hear his

yell still as he tore a hole in the horizon and jumped right through.

Then I began on that spring. 'Dig or die. Dig or die.' I said over and

over, and we are all here but Bill. I wish I'd got that Apache, though."

Jondo and I looked at each other.

"The thing is clear now," he said, aside to me. "That single trail I

found back yonder day before yesterday was Santan's running on ahead of

us to poison the water for us and then steal a horse and make his way

back to the mountains. An Apache can live on this cactus-covered sand

the same as a rattlesnake. He fixed the upper spring and came down here

to drink. Only Beverly's conscience saved him here. Heaven knows how

Fred Ramer got out here. He may have come with some Mexicans on ahead of

us and left them here to drop his poison in this lower spring. Then he

turned back toward Santa Fé and found his doom up there at Santan's

spring.

"I'm like Bev. I wish he had gotten the Apache, now. I don't know yet

how I was fooled in him, for he has always been Fred Ramer's tool, and

Father Josef never trusted him. And to think that Bill Banney, in no way

touching any of our lives, should have been martyred by the crimes of

Fred and this Apache! But that's the old, old story of the trail. Poor

Bill! I hope his sleep will be sweet out in this desolate land. We'll

meet him later somewhere."

The winds must have carried the tale of poisoned water across the

Cimarron country, for the Comanches' trail left ours from that day.

Through threescore and ten miles to the Arkansas River we came, and

there was not a well nor spring nor sign of water in all that distance.

What water we had we carried with us from the Cimarron fountains. But

the sturdy endurance of the days was not without its help to me. And the

wide, wind-swept prairies of Kansas taught me many things. In the

lonely, beautiful land, through long bright days and starlit nights, I

began to see things bigger than my own selfish measure had reckoned. I

thought of Esmond Clarenden and his large scheme of business; Felix

Narveo, the true-hearted friend; and of Father Josef and his life of

devotion. And I lived with Jondo every day. I could not forget the hour

in the little ruined chapel in the San Christobal Valley, and how he

himself had made no effort to clear his own name. But I remembered,

too, that Father Josef, mercilessly just to Ferdinand Ramero, had not

even asked Jondo to defend himself from the black charge against him.

The sunny Kansas prairies, the far open plains, and the wild mountain

trails beyond, had brought their blessing to Jondo, whose life had known

so much of tragedy. And my cross was just my love for a girl who could

not love me. That was all. Jondo had never forgotten nor ceased to love

the mother of Eloise St. Vrain. I should be like Jondo in this. But the

world is wide. Life is full of big things. Henceforth, while I would not

forget, I, too, would be big and strong, and maybe, some time, just as

sunny-faced as my big Jondo.

The trail life, day by day, did bring its blessing to me. The clear,

open land, the far-sweeping winds, the solitude for thought, the bravery

and gentleness of the rough men who walked the miles with me, the

splendor of the day-dawn, the beauty of the sunset, the peace of the

still starlit night, sealed up my wounds, and I began to live for others

and to forget myself; to dream less often, and to work more gladly; to

measure men, not by what had been, but by how they met what was to be

done.

From all the frontier life, rough-hewn and coarse, the elements came

that helped to make the big brave West to-day, and I know now that not

the least of source and growth of power for these came out of the

strength and strife of the things known only to the men who followed the

Santa Fé Trail.

III

DEFENDING THE TRAIL

XVIII

WHEN THE SUN WENT DOWN

The mind hath a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one.

--BOURDILLON.

Busy years, each one a dramatic era all its own, made up the annals of

the Middle West as the nation began to feel the thrill for expansion in

its pulse-beat. The territorial days of Kansas were big with the tragic

events of border warfare, and her birth into statehood marked the

commencement of the four years of civil strife whose record played a

mighty part in shaping human destiny.

Meanwhile the sunny Kansas prairies lay waiting for the hearthstone and

the plow. And young men, trained in camp and battle-field, looked

westward for adventure, fortune, future homes and fame. But the tribes,

whose hunting-grounds had been the green and grassy plains, yielded

slowly, foot by foot, their stubborn claim, marking in human blood the

price of each acre of the prairie sod. The lonely homesteads were the

prey of savage bands, and the old Santa Fé Trail, always a way of

danger, became doubly perilous now to the men who drove the vans of

commerce along its broad, defenseless miles. The frontier forts

increased: Hays and Harker, Larned and Zarah, and Lyon and Dodge became

outposts of power in the wilderness, whose half-forgotten sites to-day

lie buried under broad pasture-lands and fields of waving grain.

One June day, as the train rolled through the Missouri woodlands along

rugged river bluffs, Beverly Clarenden and I looked eagerly out of the

car window, watching for signs of home. It was two years after the close

of the Civil War. We had just finished six years of Federal service and

were coming back to Kansas City. We were young men still, with all the

unsettled spirit that follows the laying aside of active military life

for the wholesome but uneventful life of peace.

The time of our arrival had been uncertain, and the Clarenden household

had been taken by surprise at our coming.

"I wonder how it will seem to settle down in a store, Bev, after toting

shooting-irons for six years," I said to my cousin, as the train neared

Kansas City.

"I don't know," Beverly replied, with a yawn, "but I'm thinking that

after we see all the folks, and play with Mat's little boys awhile, and

eat Aunty Boone's good stuff till we begin to get flabby-cheeked and

soft-muscled, and our jaws crack from smiling so much when we just

naturally want to get out and cuss somebody--about that time I'll be

ready to run away, if I have to turn Dog Indian to do it."

"There's a new Clarenden store at a place called Burlingame out in

Kansas now, somewhere on the old trail. Maybe it will be far enough away

to let you get tamed gradually to civil life there, if Uncle Esmond

thinks you are worth it," I suggested.

"Rex Krane is to take charge of that as soon as we get home. Yonder are

the spires and minarets and domes of Kansas City. Put on your company

grin, Gail," Beverly replied, as we began to run by the huts and cabins

forming the outworks of the little city at the Kaw's mouth.

Six years had made many changes in the place, but the same old welcome

awaited us, and we became happy-hearted boys again as we climbed the

steep road up the bluff to the Clarenden house. On the wide veranda

overlooking the river everybody except one--Bill Banney, sleeping under

the wind-caressed sod beside the Cimarron spring--was waiting to greet

us. There were Esmond Clarenden and Jondo, in the prime of middle life,

the one a little bald, and more than a little stout; the other's heavy

hair was streaked with gray, but the erect form and tremendous physical

strength told how well the plains life had fortified the man of fifty

for the years before him. The prairies had long since become his home;

but whether in scout service for the Government, or as wagon-master for

a Clarenden train on the trail, he was the same big, brave, loyal

Jondo.

And there was Rex Krane, tall, easy-going old Rex, with his wife beside

him. Mat was a fair-faced young matron now, with something Madonna-like

in her calm poise and kindly spirit. Two little boys, Esmond, and Rex,

Junior, clinging to her gown, smiled a shy welcome at us.

In the background loomed the shining face and huge form of Aunty Boone.

She had never seemed bigger to me, even in my little-boy days, when I

considered her a giant. Her eyes grew dull as she looked at us.

"Clean faces and finger-nails now. Got to stain 'em up 'bout once more

'fore you are through. Hungry as ever, I'll bet. I'll get your supper

right away. Whoo-ee!"

As she turned away, Mat said:

"There is somebody else here, boys, that you will be glad to meet. She

has just come and doesn't even know that you are expected. It is 'Little

Lees.'"

A rustle of silken skirts, a faint odor of blossoms, a footfall, a

presence, and Eloise St. Vrain stood before us. Eloise, with her golden

hair, the girlish roundness of her fair face, her big dark eyes and

their heavy lashes and clear-penciled brows, her dainty coloring, and

beyond all these the beauty of womanly strength written in her

countenance.

Her dress was a sort of pale heliotrope, with trimmings of a deeper

shade, and in her hands she carried a big bunch of June roses. She

stopped short, and the pink cheeks grew pale, but in an instant the rich

bloom came back to them again.

"I tried to find you, Eloise. The boys have just come in almost

unannounced," Mat said.

"You didn't mean to hide from us, of course," Beverly broke in, as he

took the girl's hand, his face beaming with genuine joy at meeting her

again.

Eloise met him with the same frank delight with which she always greeted

him. Everything seemed so simple and easy for these two when they came

together. Little Blue Flower was right about them. They seemed to fit

each other.

But when she turned to me her eyes were downcast, save for just one

glance. I feel it yet, and the soft touch of her hand as it lay in mine

a moment.

I think we chatted all together for a while. I had a wound at Malvern

Hill that used to make me dizzy. That, or an older wound, made my pulse

frantic now. I know that it was a rare June day, and the breeze off the

river came pouring caressingly over the bluff. I remember later that

Uncle Esmond and Jondo and Rex Krane went to the Clarenden store, and

that Mat was helping Aunty Boone inside, while Beverly let the two

little Kranes take him down the slope to see some baby squirrels or

something. And Eloise and I were left alone beneath the trees, where

once we had sat together long ago in the "Moon of the Peach Blossom."

For me, all the strength of the years wherein I had built a wall around

my longing love, all my manly loyalty to my cousin's claims, were swept

away, as I have seen the big Missouri floods, joined by the lesser Kaw,

sweep out bridges, snapping like sticks before their power.

"Eloise, it seems a hundred years since I saw you and Little Blue Flower

ride away up the San Christobal River trail out of my sight," I said.

"It has been a long time, but we are not yet old. You seem the same. And

as for me, I feel as if the clock had stopped awhile and had suddenly

started to ticking anew."

It was wonderful to sit beside her and hear her voice again. I did not

dare to ask about her mother, but I am sure she read my thoughts, for

she went on:

"My mother is gone now. She was as happy as a child and never had a

sorrow on her mind after her dreadful fever, although the doctors say

she might have been restored if I had only been with her then. But it is

all ended now."

Eloise paused with saddened face, and looked out toward the Missouri

River, boiling with June rains and melted snows.

"It is all right now," she went on, bravely. "Sister Gloria--you know

who she was--stayed with me to the last. And I have a real mound of

earth in the cemetery beside my father." The last two words were spoken

softly. "Sister Gloria is in the convent now. Marcos is a common

gambler. His father disappeared and left him penniless. Esmond Clarenden

says that his father died out on the plains somewhere."

"And Father Josef?" I inquired.

"Is still the same strong friend to everybody. He spends much time

among the Hopi people. I don't know why, for they are hopelessly

heathen. Their own religion has so many beautiful things to offset our

faith that they are hard to convert."

"And Little Blue Flower--what became of her?" I asked. "Is she a squaw

in some hogan or pueblo, after all that the Sisterhood of St. Ann's did

for her?"

A shadow fell on the bright face beside me.

"Let's not talk of her to-day." There was a pleading note in Eloise's

voice. "Life has its tragedies everywhere, but I sometimes think that

none of them--American, English, Spanish, French, Mexican, nor any

others of our pale-faced people, have quite such bitter acts as the

Indian tragedy among a gentle race like the people of Hopi-land."

"I hope you will stay with us now."

I didn't know what I really did hope for. I was no longer a boy, but a

young man in the very best of young manhood's years. I had seen this

girl ride away from me without one good-by word or glance. I had heard

her message to me through Little Blue Flower. I had suffered and

outgrown all but the scar. And now one touch of her hand, one smile, one

look from her beautiful eyes, and all the barrier of the years fell

down. I wondered vaguely now about Beverly's wish to turn Dog Indian if

things became too monotonous. I wondered about many things, but I could

not think anything.

"I have no present plans. Father Josef and Esmond Clarenden thought it

would be well for me to come up to Kansas and look at green prairies

instead of red mesas for a while; to rest my eyes, and get my strength

again--which I have never lost," Eloise said, with a smile. "And Jondo

says--"

She did not tell me what Jondo had said, for Beverly and Mat and the two

rollicking boys joined us just then and we talked of many things of the

earlier years.

I cannot tell how that June slipped by, nor how Eloise, in the full

bloom of her young womanhood, with the burdens lifted from her heart and

hands, was no more the clinging, crushed Eloise who had sat beside me in

the church of San Miguel, but a self-reliant and deliciously

companionable girl-woman. With Beverly she was always gay, matching him,

mood for mood; and if sometimes I caught the fleeting edge of a shadow

in her eyes, it was gone too soon to measure. I did not seek her company

alone, because I knew that I could not trust myself. Over and over,

Jondo's words, when he had told me the story of Mary Marchland, came

back to me:

"And although they loved each other always, they never saw each other

again."

Nobody, outside of those touched by it, knew Jondo's story, except

myself. He was Theron St. Vrain's brother, yet Eloise never called him

uncle, and, except for the one mention of her father's grave, she did

not speak of him. He was not even a memory to her. And both men's names

were forever stained with the black charge against them.

One evening in late June, Uncle Esmond called me into council.

"Gail, Rex leaves to-morrow for the new store at Burlingame, Kansas. It

is two days out on the Santa Fé Trail. Bev will go with him and stay for

a while. I want you to drive through with Mat and the children and

Eloise a day or two later."

"Eloise?" I looked up in surprise.

"Yes; she will visit with Mat for a while. She has had some trying years

that have taxed her heavily. The best medicine for such is the song of

the prairie winds," Uncle Esmond replied.

"And after that?" I insisted.

"We will wait for 'after that' till it gets here," my uncle smiled as he

spoke. "There are more serious things on hand than where out Little Lees

will eat her meals. She seems able to take care of herself anywhere.

Wonderfully beautiful and charming young woman she is, and her troubles

have strengthened her character without robbing her of her youth and

happy spirits."

Esmond Clarenden spoke reminiscently, and I stared at him in surprise

until suddenly I remembered that Jondo had said, "We were all in love

with Mary Marchland." Eloise must seem to him and Jondo like the Mary

Marchland they had known in their young manhood. But my uncle's mood

passed quickly, and his face was very grave as he said:

"The conditions out on the frontier are serious in every way right now.

The Indians are on the war-path, leaving destruction wherever they set

foot. Something must be done to protect the wagon-trains on the Santa Fé

Trail. I have already lost part of two valuable loads this season, and

Narveo has lost three. But the appalling loss of property is nothing

compared to the terror and torture to human life. The settlers on the

frontier claims are being massacred daily. The Governor of Kansas is

doing all he can to get some action from the army leaders at Washington.

But you haven't been in military service for six years without finding

out that some army leaders are flesh and blood, and some are only

wood--plain wooden wood. Meantime, the story of one butchery doesn't get

to the Missouri River before the story of another catches up with it.

It's bad enough when it's ruinous to just my own commercial

business--but in cases like this, humanity is my business."

What a man he was--that Esmond Clarenden! They still say of him in

Kansas City that no sounder financier and no bigger-hearted humanitarian

ever walked the streets of that "Gateway to the Southwest" than the

brave little merchant-plainsman who builded for the generations that

should follow him.

"What will be the outcome, Uncle Esmond? Are we to lose all we have

gained out here?" I asked.

"Not if we are real Westerners. It's got to be stopped. The question

is, how soon," my uncle replied.

That night in a half-waking dream I remembered Aunty Boone's prophetic

greeting a few days before, and how her eyes had narrowed and grown dull

as she said, "One more stainin' of your hands 'fore you are through."

I had given six good years to army service--the years which young men

give to college and to establishing themselves in their life-work. But

the vision of the three men whom I had seen under the elm-tree at Fort

Leavenworth came back to me, and only one--the cavalry man--moved

westward now. I knew that I was dreaming, but I did not want to waken

till the vision of a fair face whose eyes looked into mine should come

to make my dream sweet and restful.

But in my waking hours, in spite of the gravity of conditions that

troubled Esmond Clarenden, in spite of the terrible tidings of daily

killings on the unprotected plains, I forgot everything except the girl

beside me as I went with her and Mat and the children to the new home in

the village of Burlingame beside the Santa Fé Trail.

Eloise St. Vrain had come up to Kansas to let the green prairies shut

out the memory of tall red mesas. About the little town of Burlingame

the prairies were waiting for her eyes to see. It nestled beside a deep

creek under the shelter of forest trees, with the green prairie lapping

up to its edges on every side. The trail wound round the shoulder of a

low hill, and, crossing the stream, it made the main street of the

town, then wandered on westward to where a rim of ground shut the view

of its way from the settlement under the trees by the creek. A stanch

little settlement it was, and, like many Kansas towns of the '60's, with

big, but never-to-be realized, ambition to become a city. Into its life

and up-building Rex Krane was to throw his good-natured Yankee

shrewdness, and Mat her calm, generous spirit; vanguards they were,

among the home-makers of a great State.

My stay in the place was brief, and I saw little of Eloise until the

evening before I was to return to Kansas City. I had meant to go away,

as she had left me in the San Christobal Valley, without one backward

look, but I couldn't do it; and at the close of my last day I went to

the Krane home, where I found her alone. It was the long after-sunset

hour, with the refreshing evening breezes pouring in from all the green

levels about us.

"Rex is at the store, and the others are all gone fishing," Eloise said,

in answer to my inquiry for the family.

"Mat and Bev always did go fishing on every occasion that I can

remember, and they will make fishermen of little Esmond and Rex now.

Would you like to go up to the west side of town and look into New

Mexico?" I asked, wondering why Beverly should go fishing with Mat when

Eloise was waiting for his smile.

But I was desperately lonely to-night, and I might not see Eloise again

until after she and Beverly--I could not go farther. She smiled and

said, lightly:

"I'm just honin' for a walk, as Aunty Boone would say, but I'm not quite

ready to see New Mexico yet."

"Oh, it's only a thing made of evening mists rising from the meadows,

and bits of sunset lights left over when the day was finished," I

assured her.

So we left the shadow of the tall elms and strolled up the main street

toward the west.

Where the one cross-street cut the trail in the center of the village

there was a public well. The ground around it was trampled into mud by

many hoofs. A Mexican train had just come in and was grouped about this

well, drinking eagerly.

"What news of the plains?" I asked their leader as we passed.

"I cannot tell you with the lady here," he replied, bowing courteously.

"It is too awful. A spear hung with a scalp of pretty baby hair like

hers. I see it yet. The plains are all _alive--alive_ with hostile red

men; and the worst one of all--he that had the golden scalp--is but a

half-breed Cheyenne Dog. Never the Apaches were so bad as he."

The cattle horned about the well, with their drivers shouting and

struggling to direct them, as we went wide to avoid the mud, then passed

up to the rise beyond which lay the old trail's westward route.

The mists were rising from the lowlands; along the creek the sunset sky

was all a flaming glory, under whose deep splendor the June prairies lay

tenderly green and still; down in the village the sounds of the Mexicans

settling into camp; the shouting of children, romping late; and out

across the levels, the mooing call of milking-time from some far-away

settler's barn-yard; a robin singing a twilight song in the elms;

crickets chirping in the long grass; and the gentle evening breeze sweet

and cool out of the west--such was the setting for us two. We paused on

the crest of the ridge and sat down to watch the afterglow of a prairie

twilight. We did not speak for a long time, but when our eyes met I knew

the hour had been made for me. In such an hour we had sat beside the

glistening Flat Rock down in the Neosho Valley. I was a whole-hearted

boy when I went down there, full of eagerness for the life of adventure

on the trail, and she a girl just leaving boarding-school. And now--life

sweetens so with years.

"I think I can understand why your uncle thought it would be well for me

to come to Kansas," Eloise said at last. "There is an inspiration and

soothing restfulness in a thing like this. Our mountains are so huge and

tragical; and even their silences are not always gentle. And our plains

are dry and gray. And yet I love the valley of the Santa Fé, and the old

Ortiz and Sandia peaks, and the red sunset's stain on the

Sangre-de-Christo. Many a time I have lifted up my eyes to them for

help, as the shepherd did to his Judean hills when he sang his psalms of

hope and victory."

"Yes, Nature is kind to us if we will let her be. Jondo told me that

long ago, and I've proved it since. But I have always loved the

prairies. And this ridge here belongs to me," I replied.

Eloise looked up inquiringly.

"I'll tell you why. When I was a little boy, years ago, a day-dreaming,

eager-hearted little boy, we camped here one night. That was my first

trip over the trail to Santa Fé. You haven't forgotten it and what a big

brown bob-cat I looked like when I got there. I grew like weeds in a

Kansas corn-field on that trip."

"Oh, I remember you. Go on," Eloise said, laughingly.