"That night after supper, everybody had left camp--Mat and Bev were

fishing--and I was alone and lonely, so I came up here to find what I

could see of the next day's trail. It was such an hour as this. And as I

watched the twilight color deepen, my own horizon widened, and I think

the soul of a man began, in that hour, to look out through the little

boy's eyes; and a new mile-stone was set here to make a landmark in my

life-trail. The boy who went back slowly to the camp that night was not

the same little boy that had run up here to spy out the way of the next

day's journey."

The afterglow was deepening to purple; the pink cloud-flecks were

turning gray in the east, and a kaleidoscope of softest rose and tender

green and misty lavender filled the lengthening shadows of the twilight

prairie.

"Eloise, I had a longing that night, still unfulfilled. I wish I dared

to tell you what it was."

I turned to look at the fair girl-woman beside me. In the twilight her

eyes were always like stars; and the golden hair and the pink bloom of

her cheeks seemed richer in their shadowy setting. To-night her gown was

white--like the Greek dress she had worn at Mat's wedding, on the night

when she met Beverly in the little side porch at midnight. Why did I

recall that here?

"What was your wish, Gail?" The voice was low and sweet.

I took her hand in mine and she did not draw away from me.

"That I might some day have a real home all my own down there among the

trees. I was a little homesick boy that night, and I came up here to

watch the sunset and see the open level lands that I have always loved.

Eloise, Jondo told me once of three young college men who loved your

beautiful mother, and because of that love they never married anybody,

but they lived useful, happy lives. I can understand now why they should

love her, and why, because they could not have her love, they would not

marry anybody else. One was my uncle Esmond, and one was Father Josef."

"And the third?" The voice was very low and a tremor shook the hand I

held.

"He did not tell me. And I speak of it now only to show you that in what

I want to say I am not altogether selfish and unkind. I love you,

Eloise. I have loved you since the day, long ago, when your face came

before me on the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth. I told you of that

once down on the bluff by the Clarenden home at Kansas City. I shall

love you, as the Bedouin melody runs,

Til the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the judgment

Book unfold!

"But I know that it will end as Uncle Esmond's and Father Josef's loving

did, in my living my life alone."

Eloise quickly withdrew her hand, and the pain in her white face haunts

me still.

"I do not want to hurt you, oh, Eloise. I know I do wrong to speak, but

to-night will be the last time. I thought that night in the church at

San Miguel, and that next day when we rode for our lives together, that

you cared for me who would have walked through fire for you. But in that

hour in the little chapel a barrier came between us. You rode away

without one word or glance. And I turned back feeling that my soul was

falling into ruins like that half-ruined little pile of stone that some

holy padre had built his heart into years and years ago. Then Little

Blue Flower brought your message to me and I knew as I sat beside Fort

Marcy's wall that night, and saw the sun go down, that the light of my

life was going out with it."

"But, Gail," Eloise exclaimed, "I said I could not send you any word,

but you would understand. I--I couldn't say any more than that." Her

voice was full of tears and she turned away from me and looked at the

last radiant tints edging the little cloud-flecks above the horizon.

"Of course I understand you, Eloise, and I do not blame you. I never

could blame you for anything." I sprang to my feet. "You'll hate me if I

say another word," I said, savagely.

She rose up, too, and put her hand on my arm. Oh, she was beautiful as

she stood beside me. So many times I have pictured her face, I will not

try to picture it as it looked now in this sweet, sacred moment of our

lives.

"Gail, I could never hate you. You do not understand me. I cannot help

what is past now. I hoped you might forget. And yet--" She paused.

All men are humanly alike. In spite of my strong love for Beverly and my

sense of right, the presence of the woman whose image for so many years

had been in the sacredest shrine of my heart, Eloise, in all her beauty

and her womanly strength and purity, standing beside me, her hand still

on my arm--all overpowered me.

I put my arms about her and held her close to me, kissing her forehead,

her cheek, her lips. The world for one long moment was rose-hued like

the sunset's afterglow; and sky and prairie, lowlands along the winding

creek, and tall elm-trees above the deepening shadows, were all engulfed

in a mist of golden glory, shot through with amethyst and sapphire, the

dainty coraline pink of summer dawns, and the iridescent shimmer of

mother-of-pearl.

Heaven opens to us here and there such moments on the way of life. And

the memory of them lingers like perfume through all the days that

follow.

We turned our faces toward the darkening village street and the tall

elms above the gathering shadows, and neither spoke a word until we

reached the door where I must say good night.

"I cannot ask you to forgive me, Little Lees, because you let me have a

bit of heaven up there. I shall go away a better man. And, remember,

that no blessing in your life can be greater than I would wish for you

to have."

The brave white face was before my eyes and the low voice was in my ears

long after I had left her door.

"Gail, I cannot help what has been, but I do not blame you. I should

almost wish myself shut in again by the tall red mesas; but maybe, after

all, the prairies are best for me. I am glad I have known you. Good

night."

"Goodnight," I said, and turned away.

And that was all. The last light of day had gone from the sky, and the

stars overhead were hidden by the thick leafage of the Burlingame elms.

XIX

A MAN'S PART

Don't you guess that the things we're seeing now will haunt us through

the years;

Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears;

Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with

a gray,

To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day?

--ROBERT W. SERVICE.

However darkly the sun may go down on hope and love, the real sun shines

on, day after day, with its inexorable call to duty. In less than a week

after I had left Eloise and the vague hope of a home of my own under the

big elm-trees of Burlingame, Governor Crawford of Kansas sent forth a

call for a battalion of four companies of soldiers, and I heard the call

and answered it.

It was to be known as the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry, with Col. Horace L.

Moore, a veteran soldier of tried mettle, at the head. We were to go at

once to Fort Harker, in the valley of the Smoky Hill River, to begin a

campaign against the Indians, who were laying waste the frontier

settlements and attacking wagon-trains on the Sante Fé Trail.

On the evening before I left home I sat on the veranda of the Clarenden

house, waiting for Uncle Esmond to join me, when suddenly Beverly

Clarenden strode over the edge of the hill. The sunny smile and the

merry twinkle of his eye were Bev's own, and there wasn't a line on his

face to show whether it belonged to the happy lover or the rejected

suitor. I thought I could always read his moods when he had any. He had

none to-night.

"I just got in from Burlingame. At what hour do you leave to-morrow? I'm

going along to chaperon you, as usual," he declared.

"Why, Beverly Clarenden, I thought you were fixed at Burlingame, selling

molasses and calico by the gallon," I exclaimed, but my real thought was

not given to words.

"And let the Cheyennes, and Kiowas, and Arapahoes, and other desperadoes

of the plains gnaw clear into the heart of us? Not your uncle Esmond

Clarenden's nephew. And, Gail, this won't be anything like we have had

since those six Kiowas staked you out on Pawnee Rock once. The

thoroughbred Indians are bad enough, but there is a half-breed leader of

a band of Dog Indians that's worst of all. He's of the yellow kind, with

wolf's fangs. A Mexican on the trail told me that this half-breed ties

up with the worst of every tribe from the Coast Range mountains to

Tecumseh, Kansas," Beverly declared.

"I remember that Mexican. I saw him at the well in Burlingame," I

replied, turning to look at the Kaw winding far away, for the memory of

everything in Burlingame was painful to me.

Aunty Boone's huge form appearing around the corner of the house shut

off my view of the river just then. Her face was glistening, but her

eyes were dull as she looked us over.

"You stainin' your hands again," she purred. "Yes, Aunty. We are going

to lick the redskins into ribbons," Beverly replied.

"You never get that done. Lickin' never settles nobody. You just hold

'em down till they strong enough to boost you off their heads again, and

up they come. Whoo-ee!"

The black woman gave a chuckle.

"Well, I'd rather sit on their heads than have them sitting on mine, or

yours, Aunty Boone," Beverly returned, laughingly.

Aunty Boone's eyes narrowed and there was a strange light in them as she

looked at us, saying:

"You get into trouble, Mr. Bev, you see me comin', hot streaks, to help

you out. Whoo-ee!"

She breathed her weird, African whoop and turned away.

"I'll depend on you." Beverly's face was bright, and there was no shadow

in his eyes, as he called after her retreating form.

We chatted long together, and I hoped--and feared--to have him tell me

the story of his suit with Eloise, and why in such a day, of all the

days of his life, he should choose to run away to the warfare of the

frontier. He could not have failed, I thought. Never a disappointed

lover wore a smile like this. But Beverly had no story to tell me that

night.

* * * * *

The mid-July sun was shining down on a treeless landscape, across which

the yellow, foam-flecked Smoky Hill River wound its sinuous way. Beside

this stream was old Fort Harker, a low quadrangle of quarters, for

military man and beast, grouped about a parade-ground for companionship

rather than for protection. The frontier fort had little need for

defensive strength. About its walls the Indian crawled submissively,

fearful of munitions and authority. It was not here, but out on lonely

trails, in sudden ambush, or in overwhelming numbers, or where long

miles, cut off from water, or exhausting distance banished safe retreat,

that the savage struck in all his fury.

Eastward from Harker the scattered frontier homesteads crouched,

defenseless, in the river valleys. Far to the northwest spread the

desolate lengths of a silent land where the white man's foot had hardly

yet been set. Miles away to the southwest the Santa Fé Trail wound among

the Arkansas sand-hills, never, in all its history, less safe for

freighters than in that summer of 1867.

In this vast demesne the raiding Cheyenne, the cruel Kiowa, the

blood-thirsty Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every

tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching

civilization of the dominant Anglo-American. The lonely trails were

measured off by white men's graves. The vagrant winds that bear the odor

of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke

of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of

human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten. The story of that

struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism and endurance. In it

the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry played a stirring part.

It seems but yesterday to me now, that July day so many years ago, when

our four companies, numbering fewer than four hundred men, detrained

from the Union Pacific train at Fort Harker on the Smoky Hill. And the

faces of the men who were to lead us are clear in memory. Our commander,

Colonel Moore, always brave and able; and our captains, Henry Lindsay,

and Edgar Barker, and George Jenness, and David Payne, with the shrewd,

courageous scout, Allison Pliley, and the undaunted, clear-thinking,

young lieutenant, Frank Stahl. Ours was not to be a record of unfading

glory, as national military annals show, yet it may count mightily when

the Great Records are opened for final estimates. Those men who marched

two thousand miles, back and forth, upon the trackless plains in that

four months' campaign, have been forgotten in the debris of uneventful

years. Our long-faded trails lie buried under wide alfalfa-fields and

the paved streets of western Kansas towns. From the far springs that

quenched our burning thirst comes water, trickling through a nickel

faucet into a marble basin, now. Where the fierce sun seared our

eyeballs, in a treeless, barren waste, green groves, atune with

song-birds, cast long swaths of shade on verdant sod. The perils and the

hardships of the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry are now but as a tale that is

told.

And yet of all the heroes whose life-trails cut my own, I account among

the greatest those men under whose command, and with whose comradeship,

I went out to serve the needs of my generation among the vanguards of

the plains. And if in a sunset hour on the west ridge beyond the little

town of Burlingame I had left a hopeless love behind me, I put a man's

best energy into the thing before me.

The battle-field alone is not the soldier's greatest test. I had kept

step with men who charge an enemy on an open plain or storm a high

defense in the face of sure defeat. I had been ordered with my company

to take redoubts against the flaming throats of bellowing cannon in the

life-and-death grip before Richmond. I had felt the awful thrill of

carnage as my division surged back and forth across the blood-soaked

lengths of Gettysburg, and I never once fell behind my comrades. The

battle-field breeds courage, and self-forgetfulness, and exaltation,

from the sense of duty squarely met.

There were no battle-fields in 1867, where Greek met Greek in splendid

gallantry, out on the Kansas plains. Over Fort Harker hung the pall of

death, and in the July heat the great black plague of Asiatic cholera

stalked abroad and scourged the land. Men were dying like rats, lacking

everything that helps to drive death back. The volunteer who had offered

himself to save the settlers from the scalping-knife had come here only

to look into an open grave, and then, in agony, to drop into it. Such

things test soldiers more than battle-fields. And our men turned back in

fear, preferring the deserter's shame to quick, inglorious martyrdom by

Asiatic cholera. I had a battle of my own the first night at Fort

Harker. There was a growing moon and the night breeze was cool after the

heat of the day. Beverly Clarenden and I went down to the river, whose

tawny waters hardly hid the tawny sands beneath them. The plains were

silent, but from all the hospital tents about the fort came the sharp,

agonized cries of pain that forerun the last collapse of the

plague-stricken sufferers. To get away from the sound of it all we

wandered down the stream to where the banks of soft, caving earth on the

farther side were higher than a man's head, and their shadow hid the

current. We sat down and stared silently at the waters, scarcely

whispering as they rolled along, and at the still shade of the farther

bank upon them. The shadows thickened and moved a little, then grew

still. We also grew still. Then they moved again just opposite us, and

fell into three parts, as three men glided silently along under the

bank's protecting gloom. We waited until they had reached the edge of

the moonlight, and saw three soldiers pass swiftly out across the

unprotected sands to other shadowy places further on.

"Deserters!" Beverly said, half aloud. "You can stay here if you want

to, Gail. I'd rather go up and listen to those poor wretches groan than

stick down here and listen to the fiend inside of me to-night."

He rose and stalked away, and I sat listening to myself. I could join

those three men easily enough. The world is wide. I had no bond to hold

me to one single place in it. I was young and strong, and life is sweet.

Why let the black plague snuff me out of it? I had come here to serve

the State. I should not serve it in a plague-marked grave. I rose to

follow down the stream, to go to where the Smoky Hill joins the big

Republican to make the Kaw, and on to where the Kaw reaches to the

Missouri. But I would not stop there. I'd go until I reached the ocean

somewhere.

Would I?

The memory of Jondo's eyes when they looked into mine on Pawnee Rock

came unbidden across my mind. Jondo had lived a nameless man. How strong

and helpful all his years had been! How starved had been my life without

his love! I would be another Jondo, somewhere on earth.

I stared after three faintly moving shadows down the stream. 'Twas well

I waited, for Esmond Clarenden came to me now, clean-cut, honest,

everybody's friend. How firm his life had been; and he had built into me

a hatred of deceit and lies. And Jondo was another Uncle Esmond. In

spite of the black shadow on his name, he walked the prairies like a

prince always. I could not be like him if I were a deserter. Up-stream

death was waiting for me; down-stream, disgrace. I turned and followed

up the river's course, but the strength that forced me to it was greater

than that which made me brave on battle-fields. And ever since that

night beside the Smoky Hill I have felt gentler toward the man who

falls.

We were not idle long for Fort Harker had just been informed of an

assault on a wagon-train on the Santa Fé Trail and our cavalry squadron

hurried away at once to overtake and punish the assailants.

We came into camp on the bank of Walnut Creek, at the close of a long

summer day of blazing light and heat over the barren trails where there

was no water; a day of long hours in the saddle; a day of nerve-wearing

watchfulness. But we believed that we had left the plague-cursed region

behind us, so we were light-hearted and good-natured; and we ate, and

drank, and took our lot cheerfully.

Among the men at mess that night I saw a new face which was nothing

remarkable, except that something in it told me that I had already seen

that face somewhere, some time. It is my gift never to forget a face,

once seen, no matter how many years may pass before I see it twice. This

soldier was a pleasant fellow, too, and, in a story he was telling,

clever at imitating others.

"Who is that man, Bev? The third one over there?" I asked my cousin.

"Stranger to me. I don't believe I ever saw him before. Who is the

fellow with the smile, Captain?" Beverly asked the officer beside him.

"I don't know. He's not in my company. I'm finding new faces every day,"

the captain replied.

As twilight fell I saw the man again at the edge of the camp. He smiled

pleasantly as he passed me, turning to look at Beverly, who did not see

him, and in a minute he was cantering down to the creek beside our camp.

I saw him cross it and ride quickly out of sight. But that smile brought

to the face the thing that had escaped me.

"I know that fellow now," I said to Beverly and the officer who came up

just then. "He's Charlie Bent, the son of Colonel Bent. Don't you

remember the little sinner at old Fort Bent, Bev?"

"I do, and what a vicious little reptile he was," Beverly replied. "But

Uncle Esmond told me that his father took him away early and had him

schooled like a gentleman in the best Saint Louis had to give. I wonder

whose company he is in."

The officer stared at us.

"You mean to say you know that cavalryman to be Charlie Bent?" he fairly

gasped.

"Of course it's Charlie. I never missed a face in all my life. That's

his own," I replied.

"The worst Indian on the plains!" the captain declared. "He stirs up

more fiendishness than a whole regiment of thoroughbred Cheyennes could

ever think of. He's led in every killing here since March."

"Not Colonel Bent's son!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, he's the half-breed devil that we'll have to fight, and here he

comes and eats with us and rides away."

"He must be the fellow that the Mexican told us about back at

Burlingame, Gail. I remember now he did say the brute's name was Bent,

but I didn't rope him up with our Fort Bent chum. Gail would have run

him down in half a minute if he had heard the name. I never could

remember anything," Beverly said, in disgust. But the smile was peeping

back of his frown, and he forgot the boy he was soon to have cause

enough to remember.

"We must run that rascal down to-night," the Captain declared, as he

hurried away to consult with the other officers.

But Charlie Bent was not run down that night. Before we had time to get

over our surprise a scream of pain rang through the camp. Another

followed, and another, and when an hour had passed a third of our forces

was writhing in the clutches of the cholera.

I shall never forget the long hours of that night beside the Walnut, nor

Beverly Clarenden's face as he bent over the suffering men. For all of

us who were well worked mightily to save our plague-stricken comrades,

whose couches were of prairie grass and whose hospital roof was the

starlit sky. However forgetful Beverly might be of names and faces, his

strong hand had that soothing firmness that eased the agony of cramping

limbs. Dear Bev! He comforted the sick, and caught the dying words, and

straightened the relaxed bodies of the dead, and smiled next day, and

forgot that he had done it.

At last the night of horror passed, and day came, wan and hot and weary

out of the east. But five of our comrades would see no earthly day

again; and three dozen strong men of the day before lay stretched upon

the ground, pulseless and shrunken and purple, with wrinkled skin and

wide, unseeing eyes.

Before the sun had risen our dead, coffined only by their army blankets,

lay in unmarked graves. Our helpless living were placed in commissary

wagons, and we took the trail slowly and painfully toward the Arkansas

River.

If Charley Bent had gathered up his band to strike that night there

would have been a different chapter in the annals of the plains.

I cannot follow with my pen the long marches of that campaign, and there

was no honorable nor glorious warfare in it. It is a story of

skirmishes, not of battles; of attack and repulse; of ambush and pursuit

and retreat. It is a story of long days under burning skies, by whose

fierce glare our brains seemed shriveling up and the world went black

before our heat-bleared eyes. A story of hard night-rides, when weary

bodies fought with watchful minds the grim struggle that drowsiness can

wage, though sleep, we knew, meant death. It is a story of fevered

limbs and bursting pulse in hospitals whose walls were prairie

distances. A story of hunger, and exhausted rations; of choking thirst,

with only alkali water mocking at us. And never could the story all be

told. There is no rest for cavalrymen in the field. We did not suffer

heavy loss, but here and there our comrades fell, by ones, and twos, at

duty's post; and where they fell they lie, in wayside graves, waiting

for glorious mention until the last reveille shall sound above the

battlements of heaven.

And I was one among these vanguards of the plains, making the old Santa

Fé Trail safe for the feet of trade; and the wide Kansas prairies safe

for homes, and happiness, and hope, and power. I lived the life, and

toughened in its grind. But in my dreams sometimes my other life

returned to me, and a sweet face, with a cloud of golden hair, and dark

eyes looking into mine, came like a benediction to me. Another face came

sometimes now--black, big, and glistening, with eyes of strange, far

vision looking at me, and I heard, over and over, the words of Esmond

Clarenden's cook:

"If you get into trouble, Mr. Bev, I'll come, hot streaks, to help you."

But trouble never stuck to "Mr. Bev," because he failed to know it when

it came.

Mid-August found us at Fort Hays on the Smoky Hill, beyond whose

protecting guns the wilderness ruled. A wilderness checkered by faint

trails of lawless feet, a wilderness set with bloody claws and poison

stings and cruel fangs, and slow, agonizing death. And with all a

wilderness of weird, fascinating distances and danger, charm and beauty.

The thrill of the explorer of new lands possessed us as we looked far

into the heart of it. Here in these August days the Cheyenne and

Arapahoe and Kiowa bands were riding trails blood-stained by victims

dragged from lonely homesteads, and butchered, here and there, to make

an Indian holiday. The scenes along the valleys of the Sappa and the

Beaver and the Prairie Dog creeks were far too brutal and revolting to

belong to modern life. Against these our Eighteenth Kansas, with a small

body of United States cavalry, struck northward from Fort Hays. We

rested through the long, hot days and marched by night. The moon was

growing toward the full, and in its clear, white splendor the prairies

lay revealed for miles about us. Our command was small and meagerly

equipped, and we were moving on to meet a foe of overwhelming numbers.

Men took strange odds with Fate upon the plains.

Beyond the open, level lands lay a rugged region hemming in the valley

of the Prairie Dog Creek. Here picturesque cliffs and deep, earth-walled

cañons split the hills, affording easy ambush for a regiment of red men.

And here, in a triangle of a few miles area, a new Thermopylae, with no

Leonidas but Kansas plainsmen, was staged through two long August days

and nights. One hundred and fifty of us against fifteen hundred

fighting braves.

In the early morning of a long, hot August day, we came to an open plain

beyond the Prairie Dog Creek. Our supply-wagons and pack-mules were

separated from us somewhere among the bluffs. We had had no food since

the night before, and our canteens were empty--all on account of the

blundering mismanagement of the United States officer who cammanded

us. I was only a private, and a private's business is not to

question, but to obey. And that major over us, cashiered for cowardice

later, was not a Kansas man. Thank heaven for that!

A score of us, including my cousin and myself, under a sergeant, and

with good Scout Pliley, were suddenly ordered back among the hills.

"Where do we go, and why?" Beverly asked me as we rode along.

"I don't know," I replied. "But Captain Jenness and a file of men were

lost out here somewhere last night. And Indian tracks step over one

another all around here. I guess we are out to find what's lost, maybe.

It isn't a twenty minutes' job, I know that."

"And all our canteens empty, too! Why cut off all visible means of

support in a time like this? Look at these bluffs and hiding-places,

will you! A handful of Indians could scoop our whole body up and pitch

us into the Prairie Dog Creek, and not be missed from a set in a

war-dance," Beverly insisted. "Keep it strictly in the Clarenden family,

Gail, but our honorable commander is a fool and a coward, if he is a

United States major."

"You speak as one expecting a promotion, Bev," I suggested.

"I'd know how to use it if I got it," he smiled brightly at me as we

quickened our pace not to fall behind.

Every day of that campaign Beverly grew dearer to me. I am glad our

lives ran on together for so many years.

The cañons deepened and the whole region was bewildering, but still we

struggled on, lost men searching for lost men. The sun blazed hotly, and

the soft yellow bluffs of bone-dry earth reached down to the dry beds of

one-time streams.

High noon, and still no food, no water, and no lost men discovered. We

had pushed out to a little opening, ridged in on either side by high,

brown bluffs, when a whoop came from the head of the line.

"Yonder they are! Yonder they are!"

Half a dozen men, led by Captain Jenness, were riding swiftly to join us

and we shouted in our joy. For some among us that was the last joyous

shout. At that moment a yell from savage throats filled the air, and the

thunder of hoofs shook the ground. Over the west ridge, half a mile

away, five hundred Indians came swooping like a hurricane down upon us.

And we numbered, altogether, twenty-nine. I can see that charge to-day:

the blinding, yellow sky, the ridge melting into a cloud of tawny dust,

the surge of ponies with their riders bending low above them; fronting

them, our little group of cavalrymen formed into a hollow square, on

foot, about our mounts; the Indians riding, in a wide circle around us,

with blankets flapping, and streamer-decked lances waving high. And as I

see, I hear again that wild, unearthly shriek and taunting yell and

fiendish laughter. From every point the riflle-balls poured in

upon us, while out of buffalo wallow and from behind each prairie-dog

hillock a surge of arrows from unmounted Indians swept up against us. I

had been on battle-fields before, but this was a circle out of hell set

'round us there. And every man of of knew, as we sent back ball for

ball, what capture here would mean for us before the merciful hand of

death would seal our eyes.

Suddenly, as we moved forward, the frantic circle halted and a hundred

braves came dashing in a fierce charge upon us. Their leader, mounted on

a great, white horse, rode daringly ahead, calling his men to follow

him, and taunting us with cowardice. He spoke good English, and his

voice rang clear and strong above the din of that strange struggle.

Straight on he came, without once looking back, a revolver in each hand,

firing as he rode. A volley from our carbines made his fellows stagger,

then waver, break, and run. Not so the rider of the splendid white

horse, who dared us to strike him down as he dashed full at us.

"Come on, you coward Clarenden boys, and I'll fight you both. I've

waited all these years to do it. I dare you. Oh, I dare you!"

It was Charlie Bent.

Nine balls from Clarenden carbines flew at him. Beverly and I were

listed among the cleverest shots in Kansas, but not one ball brought

harm to the daring outlaw. A score of bullets sung about his insolent

face, but his seemed a charmed life. Right on he forged, over our men,

and through the square to the Indian's circle on the other side, his

mocking laughter ringing as he rode. A bloody scalp hung from his spear,

and, turning 'round just out of range of our fire, shaking his trophy

high, he shouted back:

"We got all of the balance of your men. We'll get you yet."

The sun glared fiercely on the bare, brown earth. A burning thirst began

to parch our lips. We had had no food nor drink for more than twenty

hours. Our horses, wounded with many arrows, were harder to care for

than our brave, stricken men.

Night came upon the cañons of the Prairie Dog, and with the darkness the

firing ceased. Somewhere, not far away, there might be a wagon-train

with food for us. And somewhere near there might be a hundred men or

more of our command trying to reach us. But, whether the force and

supplies were safe or the wagons were captured and all our comrades

killed, as Charlie Bent had said, we could not know. We only knew that

we had no food; that one man, and all but four of our cavalry horses

lay dead out in the valley; that two men in our midst were slowly dying,

and a dozen others suffering from wounds of battle, among these our

captain and Scout Pliley; that we were in a wild, strange land, with

Indians perching, vulture-like, on every hill-top, waiting for dawn to

come to seize their starving prey.

We heard an owl hoot here and there, and farther off an answering hoot;

a coyote's bark, a late bird's note, another coyote, and a fainter hoot,

all as night settled. And we knew that owl and coyote and twilight

song-bird were only imitations--sentinel signals from point to point,

where Indian videttes guarded every height, watching the trail with

shadow-piercing eyes.

The glossy cottonwood leaves, in the faint night breeze, rippled like

pattering rain-drops on dry roofs in summertime, and the thin, willow

boughs swayed gently over us. The full moon swept grandly up the

heavens, pouring a flood of softened light over the valley of the

Prairie Dog, whose steep bluffs were guarded by a host of blood-lusting

savages, and whose cañons locked in a handful of intrepid men.

If we could only slip out, undiscovered, in the dark we might find our

command somewhere along the creek. It was a perilous thing to undertake,

but to stay there was more perilous.

"Say, Gail," Beverly whispered, when we were in motion, "somebody said

once, 'There have been no great nations without processions,' but this

is the darndest procession I ever saw to help to make a nation great.

Hold on, comrade. There! Rest on my arm a bit. It makes it softer."

The last words to a wounded soldier for whom Bev's grip eased the ride.

It was a strange procession, and in that tragic gloom the boy's

light-hearted words were balm to me.

Silently and slowly we moved forward. The underbrush was thick on either

side of the narrow, stony way that wound between sheer cliffs. We had

torn up our blankets and shirts to muffle the horses' feet, that no

sound of hoofs, striking upon the rocky path, might reach the ears of

the Cheyenne and his allies crouching watchfully above us. At the head

marched Captain Jenness and Scout Pliley, each with his carbine for a

crutch and leaning on each other for support. Followed five soldiers as

front guard through the defile. And then four horses, led by careful

hands, bearing nine suffering, silent men upon their backs. Two of the

horses carried three, and one bore two, and the last horse, one--a dying

boy, whispering into my ear a message for his mother, as I held his

hand. Behind us came the sergeants with the remainder, for rear-guard.

And so we passed, mile after mile, winding in and out, to find some

sheltering spot where, sinking in exhaustion, we might sleep.

The midnight winds grew chill, and the tense strain of that slow march

was maddening, but not a groan came from the wounded men. The vanguards

of the plains knew how to take perilous trails and hold their peace.

When the sun rose on the second day the hills about us swarmed with

savages, whose demoniac yells rent the air. Leonidas had his back

against a rock at old Thermopylae, but our Kansas plainsmen fought in a

ring of fire.

At day-dawn, our brave scout, Pliley, slipped away, and, after long

hours among the barren hills, he found the main command.

Men never gave up hope in the plains warfare, but each of us had saved

one bullet for himself, if we must lose this game. The time for that

last bullet had almost come when the sight of cavalrymen on a distant

ridge told us that our scout was on its way to us again. It took a

hero's heart to thread unseen the dangerous trails and find our comrades

with the cavalry major and bring back aid, but Pliley did it for us--a

man's part. May the sod rest lightly where he sleeps to-day.

Meantime, on the day before, the main force of our cavalry, who had

given us up for lost, had had their own long, fearful struggle. In the

early morning, Lieutenant Stahl, scouting forward in an open plain,

rushed back to give warning of Indians everywhere. And they were

everywhere--a thousand strong against a feeble hundred caught in their

midst. They rode like centaurs, and their aim was deadly true as they

poured down, a murderous avalanche, from every hillslope. Their ponies'

tails, sweeping the ground, lengthened by long horse-hair braids, with

sticks thrust through at intervals by way of ornament; their waving

blankets, and streamered lances held aloft; the savage roar from ten

hundred throats; the mad impetus of their furious charge through clouds

of dust and rifle smoke--all made the valley of the Prairie Dog seem but

a seething hell bursting with fiendins shouts, shot through with

quivering arrows, shattered by bullets, rocked with the thunderous beat

of horses' hoofs, trampling it into one great maelstrom of blood and

dirt.

All day, with neither food nor water, amid bewildering bluffs and

gorges, alive with savage warriors, the cavalrymen had striven

desperately. Night fell, and in the clear moonlight they forced their

way across the Prairie Dog, and neither man nor horse dared to stop to

drink because an instant's pause meant death.

And the evening and the morning were the first day. And the second was

like unto it, albeit we were no longer a triangle, made up of

wagon-train here and main command there, and our twenty-nine--less two

lost ones--under Captain Jenness, at a third point. Before noon, our

force was all united and we joined hands for the finish.

Beverly and I rode side by side all day. Everywhere around us the

half-breed, Charlie Bent, dashed boldly on his big, white horse calling

us cowardly dogs and taunting us with lack of marksmanship.

"I'm getting tired of that fellow, Gail. I'll pick his horse out from

under him pretty soon, see if I don't." My cousin called to me as

Bent's insolent cry burst forth:

"Come out, and let me show you how to shoot."

Beverly leaped out toward the Indian horde surrounding Bent. He raised

his carbine, and with steady aim, fired far across the field of battle,

the cleanest shot I ever saw. Years ago my cousin had urged Uncle Esmond

to let him practise shooting on horseback. He was a master of the art

now. Charlie Bent's splendid white steed fell headlong, hurling its

rider to the ground and dragging him, face downward, in the dirt.

I cannot paint that day's deeds with my pen, nor ever artist lived whose

brush could reproduce it. If we should lose here, it meant the turning

of the clock from morning back to midnight on the Kansas plains.

Between this and the safety of the prairies stood fewer than a hundred

and fifty men, against a thousand warriors, led by cunning half-breeds

skilled in the white man's language and the red man's fiendishness.

If we should lose--We did not go out there to lose. When each man does a

man's part there is no failure possible at last.

As the sun sank toward late afternoon, the savage force massed for its

great, crushing blow that should annihilate us. The strong center, made

up of the flower of every tribe engaged, was on the crest of a long,

westward-reaching slope, a splendid company of barbaric

warriors--strong, eager, vengeful, doggedly determined to finish now

the struggle with the power they hated.

The air was very clear, and in its crystal distances we could see every

movement and hear each command.

The valley rang with the taunts and jeers and threats and mocking

laughter of our foes, daring us to come out and meet them face to face,

like men. And we went out and met them face to face, like men.

A little force of soldiery fighting, not for ourselves, but for the

hearthstones of a nobler people, our cavalry swung up that long, western

slope in the face of a murderous fire, into the very heart of Cheyenne

strength, enforced by all the iron of the allied tribes. I marvel at it

now, when, in solid phalanx, our foes might easily have mowed us down

like a thin line of standing grain; for their numbers seemed unending,

while flight on flight of arrows and fierce sheets of rifle-fire swept

our ranks as we rode on to death or victory. But each man's face among

us there was bright with courage, and with our steady force unchecked we

swept right on to the very crest of the high slope, scattering the

enemy, at last, like wind-blown autumn leaves, until upon our guidons

victory rested and the long day was won.

XX

GONE OUT

I wander alone at dead of night,

But ever before me I see a light,

In darkest hours more clear, more bright;

And the hope that I bear fails never.

FREDRICH RÜCKERT.

The waters of the Smoky Hill flowed yellow, flecked with foam, beside

our camp, where, in a little grove of cottonwood trees, we rested from a

long day's march. The heat of a late Kansas summer day was fanned away

at twilight by the cool prairie breeze. There was an appealing something

in the air that evening hour that made me homesick. So I went down

beside the river to fight out my daily battle and let the wide spaces of

the landscape soothe me, and all the opal tints of sunset skies and the

soft radiance of a prairie twilight bring me their inspiration.

Each day my heart-longing for the girl I must not love grew stronger. I

wondered, as I sat here to-night, what trail would open for me when

Beverly and Eloise should meet again, as lovers must meet some time. We

had not once spoken her name between us, Bev and I, in all the days and

nights since we had been in service on the plains.

As I sat lonely, musing vaguely of a score of things that all ran back

to one fair face, Beverly dropped down beside me. His face was grave and

his eyes had a gentle, pleading look, something strange and different

from the man whose moods I knew.

"I'm homesick, Gail." He smiled as he spoke, and all the boy of all the

years was in that smile.

"So am I, Bev. It must be in the water here," I replied, lightly.

But neither one misunderstood the other.

"I'd like to see Little Lees to-night. Wouldn't you?" he asked,

suddenly.

The question startled me. Maybe my cousin wanted to confide in me here.

I would not be selfish with him.

"Yes, I always like to see her. Why to-night, though?" I asked,

encouragingly.

Beverly looked steadily into my face.

"I want to tell you something, Gail. I haven't dared to speak before,

but something tells me I should speak to-night," he said slowly.

I looked away along the winding valley of the Smoky Hill. I must hear it

some time. Why be a coward now?

"Say on, I'm always ready to hear anything from you, Beverly."

I tried to speak firmly, and I hoped my voice did not seem faltering to

him. He sat silent a long while. Then he rose and straightened to his

full height--a splendid form of strength and wholesomeness and grace.

"I'll tell you some time soon, but not to-night. Honor is something with

me yet."

And so he left me.

I dreamed of him that night with Eloise. And all of us were glad. I

wakened suddenly. Beverly was standing near me. He turned and walked

away, his upright form and gait, even in the faint light, individually

Bev's own. I saw him lie down and draw his blanket about him, then sit

up a moment, then nestle down again. Something went wrong with sleep and

me for a long time, and once I called out, softly:

"Bev, can't you sleep?"

"Oh, shut up! Not if you fidget about me," he replied, with the old

happy-go-lucky toss of the head and careless tone.

It was dim dawn when I wakened. My cousin was sleeping calmly just a few

feet away. An irresistible longing to speak to him overcame me and I

slipped across and gently kicked the slumbering form. Two cavalry

blankets rolled apart. A note pinned to the edge of one caught my eye. I

stooped to read:

DEAR GAIL, Don't hate me. I'm sick of army life. They will call me

a coward and if they get me they will shoot me for a deserter. I

have disgraced the Clarenden name. You'll never see me again.

Good-bye, old boy.

BEV.

Deserter!

The yells of all the tribes in the battle on the Prairie Dog Creek

shrieked not so fiercely in my ears as that word rang now. And all the

valley of the Smoky Hill echoed and re-echoed it.

Deserter!

My Beverly--who never told a lie, nor feared a danger, nor ever, except

in self-defense, hurt a creature God had made. I could bury Bev, or

stand beside him on his wedding-day. But Beverly disgraced! O, God of

mercy toward all cowards, pity him!

I sat down beside the blankets I had kicked apart and looked back over

my cousin's life. It offered me no help. I thought of Eloise--and his

longing to see her on the night before; of his struggle to tell me

something. I knew now what that something was. Poor boy!

He was not a boy, he was a man--strong, fearless, happy-hearted. How

could the plains make cowards out of such as he? They had made a man of

Jondo, who had all excuse to play the coward. The mystery of the human

mind is a riddle past my reading--and I had always thought of Beverly's

as an open book. The only one to whom I could turn now was not Eloise,

nor my uncle, nor Mat nor Rex, but Jondo, John Doe, the nameless man,

with whom Esmond Clarenden had walked all these years and for whose sake

he had rescued Eloise St. Vrain. They had "toted together," as Aunty

Boone had said. Oh, Aunty Boone with dull eyes of prophecy! I could hear

her soft voice saying:

"If you get into trouble, Mr. Bev, I come, hot streaks, to help you."

She could not come "hot streaks" now, for Beverly had deserted. But

there was Jondo.

I wrote at once to him, inclosing the crumpled note, and then, as one

who walks with neither sight nor feeling any more, I rode the plains and

did a man's part in that Eighteenth Cavalry campaign of '67. The days

went slowly by, bringing the long, bright autumn beauty to the plains

and turning all the elms to gold along the creek at Burlingame. Time

took away the sharp edge from our grief and shame, and left the dull

pain that wears deeper and deeper, unnoticed by us; and all of us who

had loved Beverly lived on and were cheerful for one another's sake.

When Jondo--as only Jondo could--bore the news of my letter to Esmond

Clarenden, he made no reply, but sat like an image of stone. Rex Krane

broke down and sobbed as if his heart would break. But Mat, calm,

poised, and always merciful, merely said:

"We must wait awhile."

It was many days before she broke the news to Eloise St. Vrain, who only

smiled and said:

"Gail is mistaken. Beverly couldn't desert."

It was when the word came to Aunty Boone that the storm broke. They told

me afterward that her face was terrible to see, and that her eyes grew

dull and narrow. She went out to the bluff's edge and sat staring up the

valley of the Kaw as if to see into the hidden record of the coming

years.

One October day, when the Kranes and Eloise sat with my uncle and Jondo

in the soft afternoon air, looking out at the beauty of the Missouri

bluffs, Aunty Boone loomed up before them suddenly.

"I got somebody's fortune, just come clear before me," she declared, in

her soft voice. "Lemme see you' hand, Little Lees!"

Eloise put her shapely white hand upon the big, black paw.

Aunty Boone patted it gently, the first and last caress she ever gave to

any of us.

"You' goin' to get a letter from a dark man. You' goin' to take a long

journey. And somebody goin' with you. An' the one tellin' this is goin'

away, jus' one more voyage to desset sands again, and see Africy and her

own kingdom. Whoo-ee!"

Never before, in all the years that we had known her, had she expressed

a wish for her early home across he seas. Her voice trailed off weirdly,

and she gazed at the Kaw Valley for a long moment. Then she said, in a

low tone that thrilled her listeners with its vibrant power:

"Bev ain't no deserter. He's gone out! Jus' gone out. Whoo-ee!"

She disappeared around the corner of the house and stood long in the

little side porch where Beverly had kissed Little Blue Flower one night

in the "Moon of the Peach-Blossom," and Eloise had found them there, and

I had unwittingly heard what was said.

"Is there no variation in palmistry?" Rex Krane asked. "I never knew a

gypsy in all my life who read a different set of prophecies. It's always

the dark man--I'm light (darn the luck)--and a journey and a letter. But

I thought maybe an African seer, a sort of Voodo, hoodoo, bugaboo, would

have it a light man and a legacy and company coming, instead of you

taking a journey, Eloise."

Eloise smiled.

"You musn't envy me my good fortune, Rex," she declared. "Aunty Boone

says she is going back to Africa, too. You'll need a new cook, Uncle

Esmond. Let me apply for the place right now."

My uncle smiled affectionately on her.

"I could give you a trial, as I gave her. I remember I told her if she

could cook good meals I'd keep her; if not, she'd leave. Do you want to

take the risk?"

"That's where you'll get your journey of the prophecy, Eloise," Jondo

suggested.

"Well, you leave out the best part of it all," Mat broke in. "She added

that Beverly isn't a deserter, he's just 'gone out.' Why don't you

believe it all, serious or frivolous?"

A shadow lifted from the faces there as a glimpse of hope came slowly

in.

"And as to letters, Eloise," Uncle Esmond said, "I must beg your pardon.

I have one here for you that I had forgotten. It came this morning."

"See if it isn't from a dark man, inviting you to take a journey," Rex

suggested.

"It must be, it's from Santa Fé," Eloise said, opening the letter

eagerly.

Aunty Boone had come back again and was standing by the corner of the

veranda, half hidden by vines, watching Eloise with steady eyes. The

girl's face grew pale, then deadly white, and her big, dark eyes were

opened wide as she dropped the letter and looked at the faces about her.

"It is from Father Josef," she gasped. "He writes of Little Blue Flower

somewhere in Hopi-land. He asks me to go to Santa Fé at once for her

sake. And it says, too--" The voice faltered and Eloise turned to Esmond

Clarenden. "It says that Beverly is there somewhere and he wants you.

Read it, Uncle Esmond."

As Eloise rose and laid the letter in my uncle's hand, Aunty Boone,

hidden by the vines, muttered in her soft, strange tone:

"He's jus' gone out. Thank Jupiter! He's jus' gone out. I'm goin', hot

streaks, to help him, too. Then I go to my own desset where I'm honin' o

to be, an' stay there till the judgment Day. Whoo-ee!"

In the early morning of a rare October day upon the plains I sat on my

cavalry horse beside Fort Hays, waiting for one last word from my

superior officer, Colonel Moore. He was my uncle's friend, and he had

been kind to the Clarenden boys, as military kindness runs.

"You are honorably discharged," he said. "Take these letters to Fort

Dodge. You will meet your friends there, and have some safeguard from

there on, by order of General Sheridan. God bless you, Gail. You have

ridden well. I wish you a safe journey, and I hope you'll find your

cousin soon. He was a splendid boy until this happened. He may be

cleared some day."

"He is splendid still to me in spite of everything," I replied.

"Yes, yes," my colonel responded. "Never a Clarenden disgraced the name

before. That is why General Sheridan is granting you a squad to help

you. It is a great thing to have a good name. Good-by."

"Good-by. I thank you a thousand times," I said, saluting him.

"And I thank you. A chain, you know, is as strong as its weakest link. A

cavalry troop is as able as its soldiers make it."

He turned his horse about, and I rode off alone across the lonely plains

a hundred miles away toward old Fort Dodge, beside the Arkansas River.

Jondo and Rex were to meet me there for one more trip on the long Santa

Fé Trail.

Late September rains had blessed the valley of the Arkansas. The level

land about Fort Dodge showed vividly green against the yellow sand-hills

across the river, and the brown, barren bluffs westward, where a little

city would one day rise in pretty picturesqueness. The scene was like

the Garden of Eden to my eyes when I broke through the rough ridges to

the north on the last lap of my long ride thither and hurried down to

the fort. I grant I did not appear like one who had a right to enter

Eden, for I was as brown as a Malayan. Nearly four months of hard

riding, sleeping on the ground, with a sky-cover, eating buffalo meat,

and drinking the dregs of slow-drying pools, had made a plainsman of me,

of the breed that long since disappeared. Golf-sticks and automobile

steering-wheels are held by hands to-day no less courageous than those

that swung the carbine into place, and flung aside the cavalry

bridle-rein in a wild onslaught in our epic day. Each age grows men,

flanked by the coward and the reckless daredevil.

Rex Krane was first to recognize me when I reached the fort.

"Oh, we are all here but Mat: Clarenden, Jondo, Aunty Boone, and Little

Lees; and a squad of half a dozen cavalry men are ready to go with us."

Rex drawled in his old Yankee fashion, hiding an aching heart underneath

his jovial greeting.

"All of us!" I exclaimed.

"Yes. Here they all come!" Rex retorted.

They all came, but I saw only one, veiling the joy in my eyes as best I

could. For with the face of Eloise before me, I knew the hardest battle

of my life was calling me to colors. I had forgotten how womanly she

was, or else her summer by the blessed prairies that lap up to the edge

of the quiet town of Burlingame had brought her peace and helped her to

put away sad memories of her mother.

Behind her--a black background for her fair, golden head--was Aunty

Boone.

"Our girl was called to Santa Fé, and Daniel here goes with her. I

couldn't stay behind, of course," my uncle said. "The Comanches are

making trouble all along the Cimarron, and we will go up the Arkansas by

the old trail route. It is farther, but the soldiers say much safer

right now, and maybe just as quick for us. There is no load of freight

to hinder us--two wagons and our mounts. Besides, the cavalrymen have

some matters to look after near the mountains, or we might not have had

their protection granted us."

The beauty of that early autumn on the plains and mountains lingers in

my memory still, though half a century has passed since that journey on

the old, long trail to Santa Fé.

At the closing of an Indian summer day we pitched our camp outside the

broken walls of old Fort Bent. Every day found me near Eloise, although

the same barrier was between us that had risen up the day she left me in

the ruined chapel by the San Christobal River. Every day I longed to

tell her what Beverly had said to me the night he--went out. It was due

her that she should know how tenderly he had thought of her.

The night was irresistible, soft and balmy for the time of year, as that

night had been long ago when we children were marooned inside this

stronghold. A thin, growing moon hung in the crystal heavens and all

the shadowy places were softened with gray tones. Jondo and Uncle Esmond

and Rex Krane were talking together. Aunty Boone was clearing up after

the evening meal. The soldiers were about their tasks or pastimes. Only

Eloise and I were left beside the camp-fire.

"Let's go and find the place where we spent our last evening here,

Little Lees," I said, determined to-night to tell her of Beverly.

"And just as many other places as we can remember," Eloise replied.

We clambered over heaps of fallen stone in the wide doorway, and stood

inside the half-roofless ruin that had been a stronghold at the

wilderness crossroads.

The outer walls were broken here and there. The wearing elements were

slowly separating the inner walls and sagging roofs. Heaps of debris lay

scattered about. Over the caving well the well-sweep stuck awry, marking

a place of danger. Everywhere was desolation and slow destruction.

We sat down on some fallen timbers in the old court and looked about us.

"It was a pity that Colonel Bent should have blown up this splendid

fortress, and all because the Government wouldn't pay him his price for

it," I declared.

"Destroyed what he had built so carefully, and what was so useful,"

Eloise commented. "Sometimes we wreck our lives in the same way."

I have said the twilight seemed to fit her best, although at all times

she was fair. But to-night she was a picture in her traveling dress of

golden brown, with soft, white folds about her throat. I wondered if she

thought of Beverly as she spoke. It hurt me so to be harsh with his

memory.

"Yes, Charlie Bent blew up all that the Colonel built into him, of

education and the ways of cultured folks--a leader of a Dog Indian band,

he is a piece of manhood wrecked. And by the way," I went on, "Beverly

shot his beautiful white horse on the Prairie Dog Creek. You should have

seen that shot. It was the cleanest piece of long-range marksmanship I

ever saw. He hated Bev for that."

"Maybe he gloats over our lost Beverly to-day. He is only 'gone out' to

me," Eloise said softly.

"Let me tell you something, Little Lees. Beverly and I never spoke of

you--you can guess why--until that last night beside the Smoky Hill. He

wanted to tell me something that night."

"And did he?" Eloise asked, eagerly.

"No. He said honor was something with him still. I thought he meant to

tell me of himself and you. Forgive me. I do not want any confidences

not freely given. But now I know it was the struggle in which he went

down that night that he wanted to tell me about. He said first, 'I'm

homesick. I'd like to see Little Lees.' And his eyes were full of

sympathy as he looked at me."

"Did he say anything more?" Eloise's voice was almost a whisper.

"That was all. I thought that night I should hunt a lonely trail--when

he went home to claim--happiness. But now I feel that I could live

beside him always--to have him safe with us again."

As I turned to look at Eloise something was in her big, dark

eyes--something that disappeared at once. I caught only a fleeting

glimpse of it, and I could not understand why a thrill of something near

to happiness should sweep through me. It was but the shadow of what

might have been for me and was not.

"Do you recall our prophecies here that night when we were children?"

Eloise asked.

"Yes, every one. Mat wanted a home, Bev to fight the Indians, and you

wanted me to keep Marcos Ramero in his place. I tried to do it," I

replied.

And both of us recalled, but did not speak of, the warm, childish kiss

of Little Lees upon my lips, and how we gripped hands in the shadows

when the moon went cold and grey. Life was so simple then.

"It may be, if our problems and our tragedies crowd into our younger

years, they clear the way for all the bright, unclouded years to

follow," Eloise said, as we rose to go back to the camp-fire.

"I hope they will leave us strong to meet the bright, unclouded years,"

I answered her.

On the next day the cavalrymen left us for a time, and we went on alone

southward toward our journey's end.

Autumn on the mountain slopes, and in the mesa-girdled valleys of New

Mexico hung rainbow-tinted lights by day, with star-beam pointed paths

trailing across the blue night-sky. And all the rugged beauty of a

picturesque land, basking in lazy warmth, out-breathing sweet, pure air,

made the old trail to Santa Fé an enchanting highway to me, despite the

burden of a grief that weighed me down. For I could not shut from my

mind the pitiful call of Little Blue Flower that had come to Eloise, nor

all the uncertainty surrounding my cousin somewhere in the Southwest

wanting us.

The little city of adobe walls seemed not to have changed a hair's turn

in the six years since I had seen it last. Out beyond the sandy arroyo

again Father Josef waited for us. The same strong face and dark eyes,

full of fire, the same erect form and manly bearing were his. Except for

a few streaks of gray in his close-cropped hair the years had wrought no

change in him, save that his countenance betokened the greater

benediction of a godly life upon it. As we rode slowly to the door of

San Miguel I fell behind. The years since that day when the saucy little

girl had called me a big, brown, bob-cat here came back upon my mind,

and, though my hope had vanished, still I loved the old church.

Before we had passed the doorway Eloise left her wagon and stood beside

my horse.

"Gail, let us stop here with Father Josef while the others go down to

Felix Narveo's. It always seems so peaceful here."

"You are always welcome here, my children," Father Josef said,

graciously, as I leaped from my horse and stuck its lariat pin down

beside the doorway.

Inside there were the same soft lights from the high windows, the same

rare old paintings about the altar, the same seat beside the door.

The priest spoke to us in low tones befitting sanctuary stillness. "You

have come on a long journey, but it is one of mercy. I only pray you do

not come too late," he said.

"Tell us about it, Father," Eloise urged. "The men will get the story

from Felix Narveo, but Gail and I seem to belong up here." She smiled up

at me with the words.

I could have almost hoped anew just then, but for the thought of

Beverly.

"Let us pray first," the holy man replied.

Beverly and I had been confirmed in the Episcopalian faith once long

ago, but the plains were hard on the religion of a high-church man. And

yet, all sacred forms are beautiful to me, and I always knew what

reverence means.

"You may not know," Father Josef said, "that I have Indian blood in my

veins--a Hopi strain from some French ancestors. Po-a-be, our Little

Blue Flower, is my heathen cousin, descended from the same chief's

daughter. The Hopi's faith is a part of him, like his hand or eye, and I

have never gained much with the tribe save through blood-ties. But

because of that I have their confidence."

"You have all men's confidence, Father Josef," I said, warmly.

"Thank you, my son," the priest replied. "When Santan, the Apache, came

back from a long raid eastward, he told Little Blue Flower that Beverly

had spared his life beside a poisoned spring in the Cimarron valley,

urging him to go back and marry her; life had other interests now to

white men who must forget all about Indian girls, he declared, and with

Apache adroitness he pressed his claims upon her. But Santan had slain

Sister Anita beside the San Christobal Arroyo. A murderer is abhorrent

to a Hopi, who never takes life, save in self-defense or in legitimate

warfare--if warfare ever is legitimate," he added, gravely.

"My little cousin was heart-broken, for all the years since her rescue

at Pawnee Rock she had cherished one face in memory; and maybe Beverly

in his happy, careless way had given her cause to do so."

"We understand, I think," Eloise said, turning inquiringly to me.

I nodded, and Father Josef went on. "She knew her love was foolish, but

few of us are always wise in love. So Santan's suit seemed promising for

a time. But the Hopi type ran true in her, and she put off the Apache

year after year. It is a strange case in Indian romance, but romance

everywhere is strange enough. The Apache type also ran true to dogged

purpose. Besides being an Apache, Santan has some Ramero blood in his

veins, to be accounted for in the persistence of an evil will. He was

as determined to win Po-a-be as she that he should fail. And he was

cunning in his schemes."

Father Josef paused and looked at Eloise.

"To make the story short," he began again, "Santan could not make the

Hopi woman hate Beverly, although she knew that her love was hopeless,

as it should be. Pardon me, daughter," Father Josef said, gently. "She

heard you two talking in a little porch one night at the Clarenden home,

and she has believed ever since that you are lovers. That is why she

sent for you to come to help her now."

"I saw Beverly give Little Blue Flower a brotherly kiss that night, and

I told him, frankly, how it grieved me, because I had known at St. Ann's

about her love for him. I had urged her to go with me to the

Clarendens', hoping that when she saw Beverly again she would quit

dreaming of him."

I looked away, at the paintings and the crucifix above the altar, and

the long shafts of light on gray adobe walls, wondering, vaguely, what

the next act of this drama might reveal.

"Beverly was always lovable," Father Josef said. "But now the message

comes that he is out in the heart of Hopi-land, and because Little Blue

Flower is protecting him her people may turn against her. For Beverly's

sake, and for her sake, too, my daughter, we must start at once to find

her and maybe save his life. She wants you. It is the call of

sisterhood. Sister Gloria and I will go with you. I have much influence

with my Hopi people."

"Will they put Beverly to death?" I asked.

"I cannot tell, but--see how long the arm of hate can be, my

son--Santan, the Apache, has been informed of Beverly's coming by Marcos

Ramero, gambler and debauchee. And Marcos got it in some way from

Charlie Bent, a Cheyenne half-breed, son of old Colonel Bent, a fine old

gentleman. Maybe you knew young Bent?"

"Yes, he holds a grudge against the Clarenden name because we made him

play square with us at the old fort when we were children," I told the

priest. "He yelled defiance at us in the battle on the Prairie Dog Creek

last August. Bev shot his horse from under him just to humble the

insolent dog! Beverly never was a coward," I insisted, all my affection

for my cousin overwhelming me.

"This makes it clearer," Father Josef said. "Through Bent to Ramero and

Ramero to Santan, the word went, somehow. The Apache has gathered up a

band of the worst of his breed and they are moving against the Hopis to

get Beverly. You and Jondo and Clarenden and Krane will join the little

squad of cavalry you left up in the mountains, and turn the Apache back,

and all of us must start at once, or we may be too late. May heaven

bless our hands and make them strong."

We bowed in reverence for a moment. When we hurried from the dim church

into the warm October sunlight, Aunty Boone sat on the door-step beside

my horse.

"'He's jus' gone out,' I told 'em so, back there on the Missouri River.

He's gone out an' I'm goin', hot streaks, to find him, Little Lees.

Whoo-ee!"

XXI

IN THE SHADOW OF THE INFINITE

And though there's never a grave to tell,

Nor a cross to mark his fall,

Thank God! we know that he "batted well"

In the last great Game of all.

--SERVICE.

We left Santa Fé within an hour, and struck out toward the unknown land

where Beverly Clarenden, in the midst of uncertain friends, was being

hunted down by an Apache band. As our little company passed out on the

trail toward Agua Fria, I recalled the day when we had gone with Rex

Krane to this little village beside the Santa Fé River. Eloise and

Father Josef and Santan and Little Blue Flower were all there that day;

and Jondo, although we did not know it then. Rex Krane had told Beverly,

going out, that an Indian never forgets. In all the years Santan had not

forgotten.

To-day we covered the miles rapidly. Jondo and Father Josef rode ahead,

with Esmond Clarenden and Felix Narveo following them; then came Eloise

St. Vrain with Sister Gloria; behind them, Aunty Boone, with Rex and

myself bringing up the rear. Three pack-mules bearing our equipment

went tramping after us with bobbing ears and sturdy gait.

I looked down the line of our little company ahead. The four men in the

lead were college chums once, and all of them had loved the mother of

the girl behind them. I have said the girl looked best by twilight. I

had not seen her in a coarse-gray riding-dress when I said that. I had

seen her when she needed protection from her enemies. I had not seen her

until to-day, going out to meet hardship fearlessly, for the sake of one

who wanted her--only an Indian maiden, but a faithful friend. In the

plainest face self-forgetfulness puts a beauty all its own. That beauty

shone resplendent now in the beautiful face of Mary Marchland's

daughter.

The world can change wonderfully in sixty minutes. As we rode out toward

the Rio Grande, the yellow sands, the gray gramma grass, the purple

sage, the tall green cliffs, and, high above, the gleaming snow-crowned

peaks, took on a beauty never worn for me before. Why should a hope

spring up within me that would die as other hopes had died? But back of

all my thought was the longing to help Beverly, and a faith in Aunty

Boone's weird, prophetic grip on things unseen. He had just "gone out"

to her--why not to all of us? I could not understand Little Blue

Flower's part in this tragedy, so I let it alone.

A day out from Santa Fé we were joined by the little squad of cavalrymen

with whom we had parted company back at the Fort Bent camping-place.

With these we had little cause to dread personal danger. The Apache band

was a small, vicious gang that could do much harm to the Hopis, but it

seemed nothing for us to fear.

Our care was to reach Beverly before the Hopis should rise up against

Little Blue Flower, or the band led by Santan should fall upon them.

Father Josef had sent a runner on to tell them of our coming and to warn

them of the Apache raid. But runners sometimes come to grief.

It is easy enough now to sleep most of the hours away across the and

lands that lie between the Rockies and the Coast Range mountains, where

the great "through limiteds," swinging down their long trail of steel,

sweep farther in one day than we crept in two long, weary weeks in that

October fifty years ago. Only Father Josef's unerring Indian accuracy

brought us through.

We crawled up rugged mountain trails and skirted the rims of dizzy

chasms; we wound through cañons, with only narrow streams for paths,

between sheer walls of rock; we pitched our camp at the bases of great,

red sand stone mesas, barren of life; we followed long, yellow ways over

stretches of unending plain; we wandered in the painted-desert lands,

where all the colors God has made bewilder with their beauty, in the

barest, dreariest, most unlovely bit of unfinished world that our great

continent holds; the lands forgotten, maybe, when, in Creation's busy

week, the evening and the morning were the sixth day, and the Great

Builder looked on His work and called it good.

We found the Hopi trails, but not the Hopi clan that we were seeking. We

found Apache trails behind them, but only dimly marked, as if they blew

one moccasin track full of sand before they made another.

The October days were dreams of loveliness, and dawn and sunset on the

desert were indescribably beautiful. But the nights were bitterly cold.

Eloise and Sister Gloria were native to the Southwest and they knew how

to dress warmly for it. Aunty Boone had never felt such chilling night

breezes, but not one word of complaint came from her lips in all that

journey.

One night we gathered into camp beneath the shelter of a little butte.

We had overtaken Father Josef's Indian runner an hour before. He had not

found the Hopis yet, and so we held a council.

"The Hopi is ahead of us northwest," the Indian declared.

"Is the Apache following?" Jondo asked.

The runner nodded. "They have been pursued, but they have slipped away;

the Apache goes north, they turn north-west. They take the dry lands and

the pine forests beyond; their last chance. If they hold out till the

Apache leaves, they will return safely. You follow them, wait for them,

or go back without them. It is your choice."

We turned toward the three women, one in the bloom of her young

womanhood, one with the patient endurance of the nun, one black and

strong and always unafraid.

"I do not want to leave Little Blue Flower in her hour of peril," Eloise

said.

"I can go where I am needed," Sister Gloria declared.

"This is my land, I never know Africa was right out here. I thought they

was oceans on both sides of it. I go where Bev's gone out an then I come

here and stay. Whoo-ee!"

We smiled at her mistaken dream of her far African home, and, cheering

one another on, when morning came we moved northwest.

Jondo rode beside me all that day, and we talked of many things.

"Gail," he said, "Aunty Boone is right. This is her Africa. I don't

believe she will ever leave it."

"She can't stay here, Jondo," I replied.

"She will, though. You will see. Did she ever fail to have her way?"

"No. She is a type of her own, never to be reproduced, but like a great

dog in her faithful loyalty," I declared.

"And shrewder than most men," Jondo went on. "She supplied the lost link

with Santan for me last night. Years ago, when Little Blue Flower

brought me a message from Father Josef on the morning that we took

Eloise from Santa Fé, I caught a glimpse of the Apache across the plaza

and read the message--_'trust the bearer anywhere'_--to mean that boy.

Aunty Boone had just peered out and scared the little girl away. She

told me all about it last night, when she was bewailing Beverly's hard

fate. How small a thing can open the road to a big tragedy. I trusted

that whelp till that day at San Christobal."

"I hope we will finish this soon," I said. "I don't understand Beverly

at all and I marvel at Little Blue Flower's love for him. Don't you?"

Jondo looked up with a pathos in his dark-blue eyes.

"Don't hurry, Gail. The trails all end somewhere soon. Life is a

stranger thing from day to day, but the one thing that no man will ever

fully understand is a woman's love for man. There is only one thing

higher, and that is mother-love."

"The kind that you and Uncle Esmond have," I said.

"Oh, I am only a man, but Clarenden has a woman's heart, as you and

Beverly and my sister's child all know."

"Your sister's child?" I gasped.

"Yes. When her parents went with yellow fever, too, I could not adopt

Mat--you know why. Clarenden did it for me. She has always known that I

am her uncle, but Mat was always a self-contained child."

I loved Mat more than ever from that hour.

The next day our trail ran into pine forests, where tall, shapely trees

point skyward. Not a dense woodland, but a seemingly endless one. Snows

lay in the darker places, and here and there streams trickled out into

the sunlight, whose only sources were these melting snows. It was a

land of silence and loneliness--a land forgotten or unknown to record.

The Hopi trail was stronger here and we followed it eagerly, but night

overtook us early in the forest.

That evening we gathered about a huge fire of pine boughs beneath a low

stone ridge covered with evergreen trees that sheltered us warmly from

the sharp west winds. We heard the cries of night-roving beasts, and in

the darkness, now and then, a pair of gleaming eyes, seen for an

instant, and then the rush of feet, told us that some wild creature had

looked for the first time on fire.

"To-morrow night will see our journey's end," Jondo declared. "The Hopi

can't be far away, and I'm sure they are safe yet, and we shall reach

them before the Apache does."

The Indian runner's face did not change its blankness, but I felt that

he doubted Jondo's judgment. That night he slipped away and we never saw

him again.

We were all hopeful that night, and hopeful the next morning when we

broke camp early. A trail we had not seen the night before ran up the

low ridge to the west of us. Eloise and I followed it up a little way,

riding abreast. The ridge really was a narrow, rocky tableland, and

beyond it was another higher slope, up which the same trail ran. The

trees were growing smaller and the sky flowed broad and blue above their

tops. The ground was only rock, with a thin veneer of soil here and

there. Gnarled, stunted cedars and gray, twisted cypress clung for a

roothold to these barren ledges. The morning breeze swept, sharp and

invigorating, out of a broad open space beyond the edge of this rocky

woodland height. Eloise and I pushed on a little farther, leaving the

others still on the narrow shelf above our camping-place.

Suddenly, as we rode out of the closer timber to where the scattered

growths were hardly higher than our heads, the first heaven and the

first earth seemed to pass away--not in irreverence I write it--and we

stood face to face with a new heaven and a new earth--where, in the

Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, the sublimity of the Almighty

Builder's beauty and omnipotence was voiced in one stupendous Word,

wrought in enduring color in everlasting stone. Cleaving its way

westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from

lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon

the rim of it--a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid

limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped

again through furlongs of black gneiss, red sandstone, and gray granite.

Beyond this mighty chasm great forest trees were, to our eyes, only as

weeds along its rim. Between that rim and ours we could look down upon

high mountain buttes and sloping red tablelands, and dizzy gorges with

pinnacled walls and towers and domes--vast forms no pen will ever

picture--not hurled in wild confusion by titan fury, but symmetrical and

purposeful and calm.

Through slowly crawling millions of patiently wearing years, while stars

grew old and perished from the firmament, with cloud, and frost, and

wind, and water, and sharp cutting sands, these strata of the old

earth's crust were chiseled into gigantic outlines, and all the

worn-down, crumbled atoms of debris were swept through long, tortuous

leagues of distance toward the sea by a mad river swirling through the

lowest depths. A mile straight down, as the crow never flies here, it

rushes, but to us the river was a mere creek, seen only where the lower

gorges open to the channel.

In the early light of that October morning the weird, vast shapes that

filled, the abyss were bathed in a bewildering opulence of color. Pale

gold along the farther rim, with pink and amber, blue and gray, and

heliotrope and rose--all blending softly, tone on tone. Deeper, the

heart of every rift and chasm that flows into the one stupendous

mother-rift was full of purple shadows. Not the thin lavender of the

upper world where we must live, but tensely, richly regal, beyond words

to paint; with silvery mists above, soft, filmy veils that draped the

jutting rocks and rounded each harsh edge, melting pink to rose and gray

to violet. Eternal silence brooded over all this symbol, wrought in

visible form, of His Almightiness, to whom a thousand years are as a

day, and in the hollow of whose hand He holds the universe. Measureless,

motionless, voiceless, it seemed as if all the cañons of all the

mountains of our great contienent might have given to it here

their awful depth and height and rugged strength; their picturesqueness,

color, graceful outlines, dizzy steeps and awe-inspiring lengths and

breadths. And fusing all these into itself, height on height, and

breadth on breadth, entrancing charm on charm, with all the hues that

the Great Alchemist can throw from His vast prism, it seemed to say:

"'Twas only in a vision that St. John saw the four-square city whose

twelve gates are each a single pearl! whose walls are builded on

foundation stones of jasper, sapphire, and chalcedony, emerald and

topaz, chrysolite and amethyst; whose streets are of pure gold, like

unto clear glass; whose light is ever like unto a stone most precious.

"To you who may not dream the vision beautiful, the Mighty Maker of all

things sublime has given me a token here in finite stone and earthly

coloring of that undreamed sublimity of all things omnipotent."

My companion and I sat on our horses speechless, gazing down at this

overwhelming marvel below us. We forgot ourselves, each other, our

companions of the journey, its purpose, Beverly, and his enemy Santan,

the desert, the brown plains, green prairies, rivers, mountains, the

earth itself, as we stood there in the shadow of the Infinite.

At last we turned and looked into each other's eyes for one long moment.

In its space we read the old, old story through, and a great,

up-leaping joy illumined our faces. God, who had let us know each

other, had let us stand by _this_ to feel the barrier of

misunderstanding fall away.

* * * * *

A sound of horses' hoofs on the rocky slope below us, a weird Indian

call, and a great shout from our calverymen drew us to earth

again. The Hopis were coming. Father Josef knew the signal. Our Indian

runner had found them in the night and sent them toward us. We dashed

into the forest, keeping close together; and here, a mile away, under

green pines, surrounded by a little group of a desert Hopi clan, was

Beverly Clarenden--big, strong, unhurt and joyful. And Little Blue

Flower.

The years since that far night when I had seen two maidens in Grecian

robes beside the Flat Rock in the "Moon of the Peach Blossom," had left

no trace on Eloise St. Vrain, save to imprint the graces of womanliness

on her girlish face. But the picturesque Indian maiden of that night

looked aged and sorrowful in the pine forest of her native land, bent,

as she was, with the dull existence of her own people; she, who had

known and loved a different form of life. Only the big, luminous eyes

held their old charm.

We came together in a little open space with pine-trees all about us.

The minutes went swiftly then--and I must hurry to what came hurrying

on, for much of it is lost in mist and wonder.

In the moment of glad reunion Aunty Boone suddenly gave a whoop the

like of which I had never heard before, and, dashing wildly toward

Eloise and Sister Gloria, she drove them in a fierce charge straight

back into the shelter of the pine-trees.

At the same time a sudden rain of bullets, like a swift hail-storm, and

a yell--the Apache cry of vengeance--filled the air. Long afterward we

learned that our Indian runner had met this band and tried to turn it

back--and failed. He would have saved us if he could.

It was over soon--that encounter in the forest where each tree was a

shield. The cavalrymen and maybe, too, we who had been plainsmen, knew

how to drive back a villianous handful of Apaches. In any other

moment since we had ridden out of Sante Fé we would have laughed

at such a struggle. They took us in the most unguarded instant of that

fortnight's journey.

The Hopis fled wildly out of sight. Here and there, from the defeated,

scattered band, an Apache warrior sprang back and lost himself quickly

in the shadows. But Santan, plunging into our very midst, seized Little

Blue Flower in his iron grip, and the bullet from a cavalry carbine,

meant for him, struck her.

He laughed and threw her back and, whirling, dashed--into the arms of

Aunty Boone--and stopped.

We carried our wounded tenderly up the steep wooded slope and out into

the sweet sunlight of its crest, where we laid them down beside that

wondrous rift with its shimmering mist and velvet shadows, and colorings

of splendor, folded all in the magnificence of its immensity and its

eternal silence.

We knew that Jondo's wound was mortal, and Father Josef and Eloise and

Rex Krane sat beside him, as the brave eyes looked out across the

sublimity of earthly beauty toward the far land no eye hath seen,

facing, unafraid, the outward-leading trail.

But Beverly was in the prime of young manhood, and we felt sure of him,

as Esmond Clarenden and Sister Gloria; and I ministered to his wants.

"It's no use, Gail." My cousin lifted a pleading face to mine a moment,

as on that day, years ago on the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth. Then

the bright smile came back to stay.

"Why, Bev, you have a life before you, and you aren't the only

Eighteenth Kansas man who deserted. We can pull you through somehow--and

people will forget. Even General Sheridan was willing to send a squad

with us, on the possibility of a mistake somewhere."

"Deserted!" Beverly's voice was too strong for a dying man's. "Uncle

Esmond, Jondo, Eloise--all of you--Gail calls me a deserter. Me! Knock

him over that precipice, won't some of you?"

We listened eagerly as he went on:

"Why, don't you know that Charlie Bent and his renegade dogs crawled

into camp like snakes and carried me out by force. They had a time of

it, too, but never mind. Bent told me he left a note for you. I supposed

he would say I was dead. And when Gail stirred, half awake, he went

pacing around the camp, looking so near like me I thought it was myself

and I was Charlie Bent. I was roped and gagged then, but I could see.

Deserter! I'm glad I got that white horse of his on the Prairie Dog

Creek, anyhow."

Beverly's face paled suddenly and he lay still a little while.

"I'd better hurry." The smile was winsome. "They didn't give me a ghost

of a chance to escape, but they didn't harm a hair. They kept me for a

meaner purpose, and, well, I was landed, finally, at Santan's door-step

in the Apache-land. Santan offered to let me go free if I'd persuade

Little Blue Flower--dead down there--to marry him. He had her come to me

on pretense of my sending for her. She hated the brute, and she was a

woman, if she was an Indian. I told him I'd see him in hell first, and I

told her never to give in. Poor girl! It was a cruel test, but Santan

knew how to be cruel. He said he'd fix me, and I guess he has done it."

"Oh no, Bev. You are good for a century," I declared, affectionately,

holding his head on my knee.

"Little Blue Flower managed, somehow, to fool the Apache dog, and we

escaped and got away to her people," Beverly continued, speaking more

slowly, "then she sent word to Father Josef. But the Hopi folks were

scared about the Apaches coming against them on account of harboring

me, like a Jonah, among 'em; and they were going to make it hard for

Little Blue Flower. I don't know heathen ethics in such things, but a

handful of us had to cut for it. I'm no deserter, though. Don't forget

that. As soon as I could be sure the little Indian woman's life was safe

I was going to get away and come home. I could not leave her to be

sacrificed after she had saved me from Santan's scalping-knife."

Beverly paused and looked at us. His voice seemed weaker when he spoke

again:

"I thought, sometimes, that even if I wasn't to blame for it, I ought to

take Little Blue Flower with me when I got away. Dear little girl! she

gave me one smile and whispered _'Lolomi'_ before she went just now. I

told her long ago I was just everybody's friend. I never meant to spoil

anybody's life, and I can meet her down at the end of the trail and

never fear."

Just then a half-wailing, half-purring cry came from Aunty Boone, who

was standing beside a gnarled cypress-tree.

"I knowed the morning we picked up Little Blue Flower, back at Pawnee

Rock, we was pickin' up trouble for the rest of the trail. I see it

then. You can trust a nigger 'cause they never no 'count, but you don't

know what you gettin' when you trust an Indian. But, Cla'nden, that

Apache Indian, Santan, ain't goin' to trouble you no more. When the

world ain't no fit place for folks they needs helpin' out of it, and I

sees to it they gets it, too. Whoo-ee!" She paused and leaned against

the crooked cypress. Half turning her face toward us, she continued in a

clear, soft voice:

"That man they call Ramero down in Santy Fee--I knowed him when he was

just Fred Ramer back in the rice-fields country. His father, old man

Ramer, tried to kill me once, 'cause he said I knowed too much. I helped

him into kingdom come right then and saved a lot of misery. They blamed

some other folks, I guess, but they never hunted me up at all. Good-by,

Clan'den, and you, too, Felix, and Dick Verra. I've knowed you all these

years, but nobody takes no 'count of niggers' knowin's. Good-by, Little

Lees, and all you boys. I'll see you again pretty soon, I'm goin' back

to my desset now. It's over yonder just a little way. Jondo--but you

won't be John Doe then. Whoo-ee!"

Aunty Boone slowly settled down beside the cypress, with her face toward

her beloved "desset," and when we went to her a little later, her eyes,

still looking eastward, saw nothing earthly any more forever.

Jondo's face seemed glorified as he caught Aunty Boone's last words, and

his voice was sweet and clear as he looked up at Eloise bending over

him.

"Thank God! It is all made right at last. Eloise, the charge of murder

against your father's name would have broken the heart of the woman that

I always loved--your mother. One of us had to bear the shame. I took the

guilt on myself for her sake--and for yours. I have walked the trails

of my life a nameless man, but I have kept my soul clean in God's sight,

and I know His name will soon be written on my forehead over there."

He gazed out toward the glorious beauty of the view beyond him, then

closed his eyes, and, bravely as he had lived, so bravely he went forth

on the Long Trail, leaving a name sweet with the perfume of

self-sacrifice and love.

We did not speak of him to Beverly, for our boy had suddenly grown

restless, and his blood was threshing furiously in his veins, and he was

in pain, but only briefly.

Presently he said, "Let us be alone a little." The others drew away.

"Lean down, Gail. I want to tell you something." He smiled sweetly upon

me as I bent over him.

"I tried to tell you back on the Smoky Hill, but I'd promised not to.

And honor was something to me still. But I'm going pretty soon. So

listen! I loved Eloise always--always. But she never cared for me. She

was only my good chum. I've been too happy-hearted all my days, though,

Gail, to make a cross of anything that would break me down. Men differ

so, you know, and I never was a dreamer like you. Turn me a little,

won't you, so that I can see that awful beauty down there."

I lifted his shoulders gently and placed him where his eyes could rest

on the majestic scene spread out before him.

"Eloise loves you, but she thinks you would not marry her because they

say her father was a murderer. I don't believe that, Gail. I told her

that you didn't, either, not one little minute. You care for her, I

know, and losing her will break your heart. I tried to tell you long

ago, but Little Lees made me promise not to say a word that night at

Burlingame when you had gone away and I thought maybe I had a

half-chance with her. Tell me you'll make her happy, Gail."

"Oh, Beverly, I'll do my best," I murmured, softly.

"Come closer, Gail. Look at those colors there. Is it so far across, or

only seeming so? And see the soft white clouds drop purple shadows down.

Is that the way the trail runs? How beautiful it must be farther on.

Good-by, old boy of my heart's heart, and don't forget, however long the

years, and wide away your feet may go, to keep the old trail law. 'Hold

fast.'"

We laid them away in the deep pine forest--Aunty Boone, of strange,

prophetic vision; Santan, the cruel Indian; the loyal Hopi maiden; Jondo

and Beverly. God made them all and in His heaven they will be rightly

placed.

Beside the cañon's rim, in the soft twilight hour of that October day,

Eloise St. Vrain and I plighted our troth, till death us do part--for

just a little while. Plighted it not in happy, selfish affection, such

as youth and maiden give, sometimes, each to each; but in the deep,

marvelous love of man and woman pledged where, in sacred moments on

that day, we had seen the mortal put on immortality. To us there could

be no grander, richer, lovelier setting for life's best and holiest hour

than here, where, upon things finite, there rests the beneficent

uplifting beauty that shadows forth the Infinite.

IV

REMEMBERING THE TRAIL

XXII

THE GOLDEN WEDDING

The heart that's never old! Oh the heart that's never old!--

'Tis a vision of the lavender, the crimson and the gold

Of an airy, fairy morning, when the sky is all ablaze

With an ever-changing splendor, driving back the gloom and haze!

'Tis the vision of an orchard in the balmy month of May,

Where the birds are ever singing, and the leaves are ever gay;

Where the sun is ever shining with a glory never told,

And the trees are ever blooming--for the heart that's never old!

--JAMES E. HILKEY.

The summers and winters of fifty golden years have brought to the plains

their balmy breezes and blazing heat, their soft, life-giving showers,

and their fierce, blizzard anger. And down through these fifty years

Eloise St. Vrain and I have walked the love trails of the plains

together.

In the early spring of this, our "golden-wedding" year, we sat on the

veranda of our suburban home in Kansas City, above the picturesque Cliff

Drive, rippling with automobiles. The same drive winds in its course

somewhere near the old, rough road that once led from the Clarenden

home, above the valley of the Kaw, down to the little city of great

promise--now fulfilled.

"Eloise, youth may have a charm that is all its own," I said to my wife,

"but I wonder if it really matches the enduring charm of age when one

looks back on busy years of service."

Eloise smiled up at me--the same gracious smile that has lighted all my

days with her.

"You are a dreamer still, Gail. But dreams do so sweeten life and keep

the fires of romance forever burning."

"When did romance begin with you, Little Lees?" I asked.

"I think it was on that day when I came bounding up to the door of the

old San Miguel church," Eloise replied, "and saw you looking like a big,

brown bob-cat, or something else, that might have slept in the Hondo

'Royo all your life. But withal a boy so loyal to the helpless that you

were willing to fight for me against an assailant bigger than yourself.

You became my prince in that hour, and all my dreams since then have

been of you. When did romance begin with you, or have you forgotten in

the busy years of a life swallowed up in mercantile pursuits?"

"My life may have been, as you say, swallowed up in building trade that

builds empire, but I have never forgotten the things that make it fine

to me," I answered her. "Romance for me began one day, long ago, out on

the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth. I've been a Vanguard of the

Plains since then, bull-whacker for the ox-teams that hauled the

commerce of the West; cavalryman in hard-wearing Indian campaigns that

defended the frontier; and merchant, giving measure for measure always,

like that grand man who taught me the worth of business--Esmond

Clarenden."

"On the parade-ground? How there?" Eloise asked.

"It came the day that I first knew we were to go with Uncle Esmond to

Santa Fé--for you. We didn't know that it was for you then. I think I

was born again that day into a daring plainsman, who had been a sort of

baby-boy before. I sat with Mat and Beverly on the edge of the

parade-ground, when I looked up to see, with a boy's day-dreaming eyes,

somewhere this side of misty mountain peaks, a vision of a cloud of

golden hair about a sweet child face, with dark eyes looking into mine.

That vision stayed with me until, one morning, fifty years ago, on the

rim of the Grand Cañon--you looked into my eyes again and I knew my life

dream had come true."

I rose and, bending over my wife's cloud of beautiful silvery hair, I

kissed her gently on each fair cheek.

"Gail, why not take the old trail for our golden-wedding anniversary--a

long journey, clear to the mountains?" Eloise suggested.

"There is no trail now; only its ghost haunting the way," I replied,

"but, Little Lees, I don't believe that we who look back on so many

happy years, after the stormy ones of early life, could find any other

path half so dear to us as that long path we knew in childhood and early

youth, and the one we followed together in our first years of mature

womanhood and manhood."

And so we did not celebrate one October day with all of our children and

grandchildren and friends coming to offer us gold coins, gold-headed

canes--which I do not use--and gold-rimmed glasses for eyes that see

farther and clearer than my spectacled grandsons at the university can

see to-day. We made a golden summer of the thing and followed where,

like a will-o'-the-wisp of memory, the Santa Fé Trail of threescore

years ago reached from the raw frontier at Independence on to the

Missouri bluffs, clear to the sunny valley of the Holy Faith.

Only a headstone at long intervals shows the way now--a stone that well

might read:

Here ran the old Santa Fé Trail. This stone, set here, is sacred to

the memory of the Vanguards of the Plains who followed it.

They stand, these "markers" now, on hilltops and in deep valleys; by

country crossroads and where main streets cut each other in the towns

and villages. They ornament the city parks, they show where splendid

concrete bridges, re-enforced with structural steel, span streams that

once the ox-teams doubled and trebled strength to ford. They gleam where

corn grows tall and black on fertile prairies; where seas of wheat have

flooded barren, burning plains, and perfumey alfalfa sweetens the air

above what was once grassless desolation. They whisper of a day gone by

among the silent mountains, where tunnels let the iron trail run easily

under the old trail's dizzy path. They nestle in the shadows of

gray-green cliffs and by red mesa heights; until the last monument,

sacred to the memory of a day forgotten, speaks at the corner of the old

Plaza in the heart of Santa Fé.

That was a journey long to be remembered--the long, golden-wedding

journey of Gail Clarenden with his wife, Eloise St. Vrain, and all of it

was sweet with memories of other days. Not in peril and privation and

uncertainty did we follow the trail now. The Pullman has replaced the

Conestoga wagon, dainty viands the coarse food smoke-blackened over

camp-fires, and never fear of Kiowa nor Comanche broke our slumber. The

long shriek that cuts the air of dawn was not from wild marauders on a

daybreak raid down lonely cañons, but from the throats of splendid,

steel-wrought engines swinging forth upon their solid, certain course.

The prairies still lap up to the edges of the little town of Burlingame,

whose main street is still the old trail's path. The well has long since

disappeared from the center of the place. Where once the thirsty

gathered here to drink, there stands a monument sacred to the memory of

the old trail days. And sacred, too, to the memory of the one

far-visioned woman, Fannie Geiger Thompson, who first conceived the

thought of marking for the coming generations the course of commerce

that built up the West in years gone by.

We never lived in Burlingame, where once--a heart-hungry little boy--I

longed to have a home. But the Krane children and their children's

children still make it an abiding-place for us.

To Council Grove, and old Pawnee Rock, the Cimarron Crossing of the

Arkansas River, the open plain about the site of old Fort Bent--where

only ghosts of walls and the court remain, and on to Santa Fé, dreamy

and picturesque--hoary with age, and sweet with sacred memories, we

wandered on our golden-wedding trail.

The name of Narveo in New Mexico still stands for gentleman. The old

church of San Miguel still shelters troubled hearts, and in the San

Christobal valley the Pictured Rocks still build up a rude stair for

feet that still may need the sanctuary rim of safety set about them.

Along the length of the old trail a marvelous fifty years have enriched

a history whose epic days record the deeds of vanguards, who foreran and

builded for the softer days of golden-wedding years.

The last lap of all that wondrous journey bore us in ease and comfort

beyond the desert--the Africa, of Aunty Boone's weird fancy--to the

Grand Cañon of the Colorado. Here, as of old, the riven crust, in its

eternal silence, and sublimity, and beauty indescribable, calmly, year

by year, reveals its mighty purpose:

To quarry the heart of earth,

Till, in the rock's red rise,

Its age and birth, through an awful girth

Of strata, should show the wonder-worth

Of patience to all eyes.

Amid luxurious surroundings we lived the October days upon the cañon's

rim, where, half a century ago, we had gone in hardship and looked on

tragedy. We crept down all the dizzy lengths to the very heart of it,

and ate and slept in easy comfort, and gazed upward at the sky-cleaving

edges thousands of feet above us; we stood beside the raging Colorado

River, which no man had explored when we first looked upon it here. In

the serene hours of our sunset years we went back in memory over the

long way our feet had come. Life is easy for us now, made so by all the

splendid, simple forces of those who, in justice, honesty, and broad

human sympathy build enduring empire. Not empire gained by bomb and

liquid fire, defended by sharp entanglement and cross-trenched to shut

out enemies; but empire builded on the commerce of the land, value for

value; empire of bridged rivers, quick transportation on steel-marked

trails that girdle harvest fields and fruitful pastures; empire of homes

and schools and sacred shrines.

Our fifty golden years have seen such empire rise and grow before our

eyes, made great by thrift and business sense, swayed by the Golden

Rule. An empire rich in love and sweet romance and thrilling deeds of

courage and self-sacrifice. Glad am I to have been a vanguard of its

trails upon the Kansas prairies and the far Western plains, sure now, as

always down the years, that its old law is still a righteous one: To

that which is good--

"HOLD FAST."

THE END

BOOKS BY

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End of Project Gutenberg's Vanguards of the Plains, by Margaret McCarter