IX

IN THE MOON OF THE PEACH BLOSSOM

Love took me softly by the hand,
Love led me all the country o'er,
And showed me beauty in the land,
That I had never seen before.
--ANONYMOUS.

You might not be able to find the house to-day, nor the high bluff whereon it stood. So many changes have been wrought in half a century that what was green headland and wooded valley in the far '50's may be but a deep cut or a big fill for a new roadway or factory site to-day. So diligently has Kansas City fulfilled the scriptural prophecy that "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low."

Where the great stream bends to the east, the rugged heights about its elbow, Aunty Boone, in those days, was wont to declare, did not offer enough level ground to set a hen on. Small reason was there then to hope that a city, great and gracious, would one day cover those rough ravines and grace those slopes and hilltops in the angle between the Missouri and the Kaw.

Aunty Boone had resented leaving Fort Leavenworth when the Clarenden business made the young city at the Kaw's mouth more desirable for a home. But Esmond Clarenden foresaw that a military post, when the protection it offers is no longer needed, will not, in itself, be a city-builder. The war had brought New Mexico into United States territory; railroads were slowly creeping westward toward the Mississippi River; steamboats and big covered wagons were bringing settlers into Kansas, where little cabins were beginning to mark the landscape with new hearth-stones. Congress was wrangling over the great slavery question. The Eastern lawmakers were stupidly opposing the efforts of Missouri statesmen to extend mail routes westward, or to spend any energy toward developing that so-called worthless region which they named "the great American desert." And the old Santa Fé Trail was now more than ever the highway for the commerical treasures of the Rocky Mountains and the great Southwest.

It was the time of budding things. In the valley of the Missouri the black elm boughs, the silvery sycamores and cottonwoods, and the vines on the gray rock-faced cliffs were veiled in shimmering draperies of green, with here and there a little group of orchard trees faintly pink against the landscape's dainty verdure.

Beverly Clarenden and I stood on the deck of a river steamer as it made the wharf at old Westport Landing, where Esmond Clarenden waited for us. And long before the steamer's final bump against the pier we had noted the tall, slender girl standing beside him. We had been away three years, the only schooling outside of Uncle Esmond's teaching we were ever to have. We were big boys now, greatly conscious of hands and feet in our way, "razor broke," Aunty Boone declared, brimful of hilarity and love of adventure, and eager for the plains life, and the dangers of the old trail by which we were to conquer or be conquered. In the society of women we were timid and ill at ease. Aside from this we were self-conceited, for we knew more of the world and felt ourselves more important on that spring morning than we ever presumed to know or dared to feel in all the years that followed.

"Who is she, Gail, that tall one by little fat Uncle Esmond?" Beverly questioned, as we neared the wharf. "You don't reckon he's married, Bev? He's all of twenty-four or five years older than we are, and we aren't calves any more." I replied, scanning the group on the wharf.

But we forgot the girl in our eagerness to bound down the gang-plank and hug the man who meant all that home and love could mean to us. In our three growing years we had almost eliminated Mat Nivers, save as a happy memory, for mails were slow in those days and we were poor letter-writers; and we had wondered how to meet her properly now. But when the tall, slender girl on the wharf came forward and we looked into the wide gray eyes of our old-time playmate whom, as little boys, we had both vowed to marry, we forgot everything in our overwhelming love for our comrade-in-arms, our jolliest friend and counselor.

"Oh, Mat, you miserable thing!" Beverly bubbled, hugging her in his arms.

"You are just bigger and sweeter than ever. I mistook you for Aunty Boone at first," I chimed in, kissing her on each cheek. And we all bundled away in an old-fashioned, low-swung carriage, happy as children again, with no barrier between us and the dear playmate of the past.

The new home, on the high crest overlooking the Missouri valley, nestled deep in the shade of maple and elm trees, a mansion, compared to that log house of blessed memory at Fort Leavenworth. A winding road led up the steep slope from a wooded ravine where a trail ran out from the little city by the river's edge. Vistas of sheer cliff and stretches of the muddy on-sweeping Missouri and the full-bosomed Kaw, with scrubby timbered ravines and growing groves of forest trees, offered themselves at every turn. And from the top of the bluff the world unrolled in a panorama of nature's own shaping and coloring.

The house was built of stone, with vines climbing about its thick walls, and broad veranda. And everywhere Mat's hands had put homey touches of comfort and beauty. An hundredfold did she return to Esmond Clarenden all the care and protection he had given to her in her orphaned childhood. And, after all, it was not military outposts, nor railroads, nor mail-lines alone that pushed back the wilderness frontier. It was the hand of woman that also builded empire westward.

"Mat's got her wish at last," I said, as we sat with Uncle Esmond after dinner under a big maple tree and looked out at the far yellow Missouri, churning its spring floods to foam against the snags along its high-water bound.

"What's Mat's wish?" Uncle Esmond asked.

"To have a good home and stay there . She wished that one night, years ago back in old Fort Bent. Don't you remember, Bev, when we were out in the court, and how scared blue we all were when the moon went under a cloud, and that Indian boy, Santan, was creeping between us and the home base?"

"No, I don't remember anything except that we were in Fort Bent. Got in by the width of a hair ahead of some Mexicans and Indians, and got out again after a jolly six weeks. What's the real job for us now, Uncle Esmond?"

Uncle Esmond was staring out toward the Kaw valley, rimmed by high bluffs in the distance.

"I don't know about Mat having her wish," he said, thoughtfully, "but never mind. Trade is booming and I'm needing help on the trail this spring. Jondo starts west in two weeks."

Beverly and I sprang up. Six feet of height, muscular, adventure-loving, fearless, we had been made to order for the Santa Fé Trail. And if I was still a dreamer and caught sometimes the finer side of ideals, where Beverly Clarenden saw only the matter-of-fact, visible things, no shrewder, braver, truer plainsman ever walked the long distances of the old Santa Fé Trail than this boy with his bright face and happy-go-lucky spirit unpained by dreams, untrammeled by fancies.

"Two weeks! We are ready to start right after supper," we declared.

"Oh, I have other matters first," Uncle Esmond said. "Beverly, you must go up to Fort Leavenworth and arrange a lot of things with Banney for this trip. He's to go, too, because military escort is short this season."

"Suits me!" Beverly declared. "Old Bill Banney and I always could get along together. And this infant here?"

"I'm going to send Gail down to the Catholic Mission, in Kansas. You remember little Eloise St. Vrain, of course?" Uncle Esmond asked.

"We do!" Beverly assured him. "Pretty as a doll, gritty as a sand-bar, snappy as a lobster's claw--she dwells within my memory yet."

All girls were little children to us, for the scheme of things had not included them in our affairs.

I threw a handful of grass in the boy's face, and Uncle Esmond went on.

"She's been at St. Ann's School at the Osage Mission down on the Neosho River for two or three years, and now she is going to St. Louis. In these troublesome times on the border, if I have a personal interest, I feel safer if some big six-footer whom I can trust comes along as an escort from the Neosho to the Missouri," Uncle Esmond explained.

And then we spoke of other things: the stream of emigration flowing into the country, the possibilities of the prairies, the future of the city that should hold the key to the whole Southwest, and especially of the chance and value of the trail trade.

"It's the big artery that carries the nation's life-blood here," Esmond Clarenden declared. "Some day when the West is full of people, and dowered with prosperity, it may remember the men who built the highway for the feet of trade to run in. And the West may yet measure its greatness somewhat by the honesty and faithfulness of the merchant of the frontier, and more by the courage and persistence of the boys who drove the ox-teams across the plains. Don't forget that you yourselves are State-builders now."

He spoke earnestly, but his words meant little to me. I was looking out toward the wide-sweeping Kaw and thinking of the journey I must make, and wondering if I should ever feel at ease in the society of women. Wondering, too, what I should say, and how I should really take care of "Little Lees," who had crossed the plains with us almost a decade ago; the girl who had held my hand tightly one night at old Fort Bent when the shadow had slipped across the moon and filled the silvery court with a gray, ghostly light.

That night the old heart-hunger of childhood came back to me, the visions of the day-dreaming little boy that were almost forgotten in the years that had brought me to young manhood. And clearly again, as when I heard Uncle Esmond's voice that night on the tableland above the valley of the Santa Fé, I heard his gentle words:

"Sometimes the things we long for in our dreams we must fight for, and even die for, that those who come after us may be the better for our having them."

But these thoughts passed with the night, and in my youth and inexperience I took on a spirit of fatherly importance as I went down to St. Ann's to safeguard a little girl on her way through the Kansas territory to the Missouri River.

It had been a beautiful day, and there was a freshness in the soft evening breeze, and an up-springing sweetness from the prairies. A shower had passed that way an hour before, and the spirit of growing things seemed to fill the air with a voiceless music.

Just at sunset the stage from the north put me down in front of St. Ann's Academy in the little Osage Mission village on the Neosho.

A tall nun, with commanding figure and dignified bearing, left the church steps across the road and came slowly toward me.

"I am looking for Mother Bridget, the head of this school," I said, lifting my hat.

"I am Mother Bridget." The voice was low and firm. One could not imagine disobedience under her rule.

"I come from Mr. Esmond Clarenden, to act as escort for a little girl, Eloise St. Vrain, who is to leave here on the stage for Kansas City to-morrow," I hesitatingly offered my letter of introduction, which told all that I had tried to say, and more.

The woman's calm face was gentle, with the protective gentleness of the stone that will not fail you when you lean on it. One felt sure of Mother Bridget, as one feels sure of the solid rock to build upon. She looked at me with keen, half-quizzical eyes. Then she said, quietly:

"You will find the little girl down by Flat Rock Creek. The Indian girl, Po-a-be, is with her. There may be several Indian girls down there, but Po-a-be is alone with little Eloise."

I bowed and turned away, conscious that, with this good nun's sincerity, she was smiling at me back of her eyes somehow.

As I followed the way leading to the creek I passed a group or two of Indian girls--St. Ann's, under the Loretto Sisterhood, was fundamentally a mission school for these--and a trio of young ladies, pretty and coquettish, with daring, mischievous eyes, whose glances made me flush hot to the back of my neck as I stumbled by them on my way to the stream.

The last sun rays were glistening on the placid waters of the Flat Rock, and all the world was softly green, touched with a golden glamour. I paused by a group of bushes to let the spell of the hour have its way with me. I have always loved the beautiful things of earth; as much now as in my childhood days, when I felt ashamed to let my love be known; as now I dare to tell it only on paper, and not to that dear, great circle of men and women who know me best to-day.

The sound of footsteps and the murmur of soft voices fitted into the sweetness of that evening hour as two girls, one of them an Indian, came slowly down a well-worn path from the fields above the Flat Rock Valley. They did not see me as they sat down on some broad stones beside the stream.

I started forward to make myself known, but caught myself mid-step, for here was a picture to make any man pause.

The Indian girl facing me was Little Blue Flower, the Kiowas' captive, whom we had rescued at Pawnee Rock. Her heavy black hair was coiled low on her neck, a headband of fine silverwork with pink coral pendants was bound about her forehead and gleaming against her jetty hair. With her well-poised head, her pure Indian features, her lustrous dark eyes, her smooth brown skin, her cheeks like the heart of those black-red roses that grow only in richest soil--surely there was no finer type of that vanishing race in all the Indian pueblos of the Southwest. But the girl beside her! Was it really so many years ago that I stood by the bushes on the Flat Rock's edge and saw that which I see so clearly now? Then these years have been gracious indeed to me. The sun's level beams fell on the masses of golden waves that swept in soft little ripples back from the white brow to a coil of gold on the white neck, held, like the Indian girl's, with a headband of wrought silver, and goldveined turquoise; it fell on the clear, smooth skin, the pink bloom of the cheek, the red lips, the white teeth, the big dark eyes with their fringe of long lashes beneath straight-penciled dark brows; on the curves of the white throat and the round white arms. Only a master's hand could make you see these two, beautiful in their sharp contrast of deep brown and scarlet against the dainty white and gold.

"Oh, Little Blue Flower, it will not make me change."

I caught the words as I stepped toward the two, and the Indian's soft, mournful answer:

"But you are Miss St. Vrain now. You go away in the morning--and I love you always."

The heart in me stopped just when all its flood had reached my face.

"Miss St. Vrain," I repeated, aloud.

The two sprang up. That afternoon they had been dressed for a girls' frolic in some Grecian fashion. I cannot tell a Watteau pleat from window-curtain. I am only a man, and I do not name draperies well. But these two standing before me were gowned exactly alike, and yet I know that one was purely and artistically Greek, and one was purely and gracefully Indian.

"I beg your pardon. I am Mr. Clarenden," I managed to say.

At the name Little Blue Flower's eyes looked as they did on that hot May night out at Pawnee Rock when she heard Beverly Clarenden's boyish voice ring out, defiantly:

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

But the great light that had leaped into the girl's eyes died slowly out as she gazed at me.

"You are not Beverly Clarenden," she said, in a low voice.

"No, I'm Gail, the little one. Bev is up at Fort Leavenworth now," I replied.

She turned away without a word and, gathering her draperies about her, sped up the pathway toward the fields above the creek.

* * * * *

And we two were alone together--the dark-eyed girl of my boyhood vision, deep-shrined in the boy-heart's holy of holies, and I who had waited for her coming. It was the hour of golden sunset and long twilight afterglow on the glistening Flat Rock waters and the green prairies beyond the Neosho.

A sudden awakening came over me, and in one swift instant I understood my boyhood dreams and hopes and visions.

"You will pardon me for coming so abruptly, Miss St. Vrain," I said. "Mother Bridget told me I would find you here."

The girl listened to my stumbling words with eyes full of laughter.

"Don't call me Miss St. Vrain, please. Let me be Eloise, and I can call you Gail. Even with your height and your broad shoulders you haven't changed much. And in all these years I was always thinking of you growing up just as you are. Let's sit down and get acquainted again."

She offered me her hand and we sat down together. I could not speak then, for one sentence was ringing in my ears--"I was always thinking of you." In those years when Beverly and I had put away all thoughts of sweethearts--they could not be a part of the plainsman's life before us--sweethearts such as older boys in school boasted about, "she was always thinking of me." The thought brought a keen hurt as if I had done her some great wrong, and it held me back from words.

She could not interpret my silence, and a look of timidity crept over her young face.

"I didn't mean to be so--so bold with a stranger," she began.

"You aren't bold, and we aren't strangers. I was just too stupid to think anybody else could get out of childhood except old Bev Clarenden and myself," I managed to say at last. "I even forgot Mat Nivers, who is a young lady now, and Aunty Boone, who hasn't changed a kink of her woolly hair. But we couldn't be strangers. Not after that trip across the plains and living at old Fort Bent as we did."

I paused, and the memory of that last night at the fort made me steal a glance at Eloise to see if she, too, remembered.

She was fair to see just then, with the pink clouds mirrored on the placid waters reflected in the pink of her cheeks.

"Do you remember what I called you the first time I saw you?" She looked up with shining eyes.

"You called me a big brown bob-cat, and you said I looked like I'd slept in the Hondo 'royo all my life. I know I looked it, too. I'll forgive you if you will excuse my blunder to-day. What became of that boy, Marcos? Have you ever seen him since you left Santa Fé?" I asked.

The fair face clouded, and a look of longing crept into the big, dark eyes lifted pleadingly a moment to mine. I wanted to take her in my arms right then and look about for something to kill for her sake. Yet I would not, for the gold of all the Mexicos, have touched the hem of her Grecian robe.

"Yes, I have seen Marcos many times. His father went to old Mexico after the war, but the Rameros do not stay long anywhere. Marcos made life miserable for me sometimes." She paused suddenly.

"The Rameros. Then he was the son of the man who was my uncle's enemy. Maybe you did as much for him, too, sometimes. You had the spirit to do it, anyhow," I said, lightly, to hide my real feeling.

"I was a little cat. I'm a lot better now. Let's not go too much into that time. Tell me where you have been and where you are going." Eloise changed the subject easily.

"I've been in Cincinnati, attending a boys' school for three years. I start for Santa Fé in two weeks. My uncle's store is doing a big over land business, and he keeps the ox-teams just fanning one another, coming and going across the prairies. I'm crazy to go and see the open plains again. Cincinnati is a city on stilts, and our little Independence-Westport Landing-Kansas City place, as the Cincinnati of the great American desert, is also pretty bumpy, the last place on earth to put a town--only we can see almost to Santa Fé, New Mexico, from the hilltops. Won't it be great to view that mud-walled town again? Bev is going, too--to kill a few Indians for our winter's meat, he says, in his wicked, blood-thirsty way." So I ran on, glad to be alive in the delicious beauty of that spring evening as we together went back over the days of our young years.

"Gail, may we take another passenger to-morrow?" Eloise asked, suddenly.

"Why, as many as the stage will hold! There's to be a nun and a priest and yourself. I'm chaperon. I could take the priest on my lap if he isn't too bulky," I answered.

"I want to take Po-a-be. I can't tell you why now." The lashes dropped over the brown eyes, and I wondered how she could think that I could refuse her anything.

"Oh, we'll take her on faith and the stage-coach. She can come right to Castle Clarenden and stay till she gets ready to hurdle off to her own 'wickie up'. She has grown into a beautiful Indian woman, though I couldn't call her a squaw."

"She isn't a squaw. I'm glad to hear you say that. I think it will make her very happy to stay at your home for a while. She will miss me a little when we leave here, maybe," Eloise said, looking at me with a grateful smile that sent a tingle to my fingertips.

"Won't you stay, too?" I asked, suddenly realizing that this beautiful girl might slip away as easily as she had come into my life here.

Eloise laughed at my earnestness.

"I couldn't stay long," she said, lightly.

"And why not?" I burst in, eagerly. "What have you in Santa Fé?"

"A little money and a lot of memories," she replied, seriously.

"Oh, I can bring the money up to Kansas for you in an ox-train easily enough, and you could blow up the old mud-box of a town and not hurt a hair on the head of a single memory. You know you can take them anywhere you go. I do mine."

"I'm going to St. Louis, anyhow," Eloise returned, "and you have no sacred memories--boys don't care for things like girls do."

"They don't? They don't? And I have forgotten the little girl who was afraid one moonlit night out in the court at Fort Bent and asked me that I shouldn't ever let Marcos pull her hair. Yes, boys forget."

I laid my hand on her arm and bent forward to look into her face. For just one flash those big dark eyes looked straight at me, with something in their depths that I shall never forget.

Then she moved lightly from me.

"Oh, all children remember, I suppose. I do, anyhow--a thousand things I'd like to forget. It is lovely by the river. Suppose we go down there for a little while. I must not stay out here too long."

I took her arm and we strolled down the quiet path in the twilight sweetness to where the broad Neosho, brim full from the spring rains, swept on between picturesque banks. The afterglow of sunset was flaming gorgeously above the western prairies, and the mists along the Neosho were lavender and mother-of-pearl. And before all this had deepened to purple darkness the full moon would swing up the sky, swathing the earth with a softened radiance. All the beauty of this warm spring night seemed but a setting for this girl in her graceful Greek draperies, with the waving gold of her hair and her dainty pink-and-white coloring.

A new heaven and a new earth had begun for me, and a delicious longing, clean and sweet, that swept every commoner feeling far away. What matter that the life before me be filled with danger, and all the coarse and cruel things of the hard days of the Santa Fé Trail? In that hour I knew the best of life that a young man can know. Its benediction after all these years of change is on me still. Awhile we watched the flashing ripples on the river, and the sky's darkening afterglow. Then we turned to the moonlit east.

"Do you know what the people of Hopi-land call this month?" Eloise asked.

"I don't know Hopi words for what is beautiful," I replied.

"They call it 'the Moon of the Peach Blossom', and they cherish the time in their calendar."

"Then we will be Hopi people," I declared, "for it was in their Moon of the Peach Blossom that you grew up for me from the little girl who called me a bob-cat down in the doorway of the old San Miguel Church in Santa Fé, and from Aunty Boone's 'Little Lees' at old Fort Bent, to the Eloise of St. Ann's by the Kansas Neosho."

The sound of a sweet-toned bell told us that we must not stay longer, and together we followed the path from the Flat Rock up to the academy door. And all the way was like the ways of Paradise to me, for I was in the peach-blossom moon of my own life.

---

X

THE HANDS THAT CLING

The hands that take
No weight from your sad cross, oh, lighter far
It were but for the burden that they bring!
God only knows what hind'ring things they are--
The hands that cling.
--ESTHER M. CLARK

The next morning three of us waited in the stage before the door of St. Ann's Academy. A thin-faced nun, who was called Sister Anita, sat beside Eloise St. Vrain, her snowy head-dress, with her black veil and somber garments, contrasting sharply with the silver-gray hat and traveling costume of her companion. Hints of pink-satin linings to coat-collar and pocket-flaps, and the pink facing of the broad hat-brim, seemed borrowed from the silver and pink of misty morning skies, with the golden hair catching the glint of all the early sunbeams. There was a tenderness in the bright face, the sadness which parting puts temporarily into young countenances. The girl looked lovingly at the church, and St. Ann's, and the green fields reaching up to the edge of the mission premises.

As we waited, Mother Bridget and Little Blue Flower came slowly out of the academy door. The good mother's arm was around the Indian girl, and her eyes filled with tears as she looked down affectionately at the dark face.

Little Blue Flower, true to her heritage, gave no sign of grief save for the burning light in her big, dry eyes. She listened silently to Mother Bridget's parting words of advice and submitted without response to the embrace and gentle good-by kiss on her brown forehead.

The good woman gazed into my face with penetrating eyes, as if to measure my trustworthiness.

"You will see that no harm comes to my little Po-a-be. The wolves of the forest are not the only danger for the unprotected lambs," she said, earnestly.

"I'll do my best, Mother Bridget," I responded, feeling a swelling pride in my double charge.

Mother Bridget patted Eloise's hand and turned away. She loved all of her girls, but her heart went out most to the Indian maidens whom she led toward her civilization and her sacred creed.

As she turned away, the priest who was to go with us came out of the church door to the stage.

Little Blue Flower sat with the other two women, facing us, her dark-green dress with her rich coloring making as strong a contrast as the nun's black robe against the pink-touched silver-gray gown. And the Indian face, strong, impenetrable, with a faintly feminine softening of the racial features, and the luminous black eyes, gave setting to the pure Saxon type of her companion.

I turned from the three to greet the priest and give him a place beside me. His face seemed familiar, but it was not until I heard his voice, in a courteous good-morning, that I knew him to be the Father Josef who had met us on the way into Santa Fé years before, and who later had shown us the little golden-haired girl asleep on the hard bench in the old mission church of Agua Fria. A page of my boyhood seemed suddenly to have opened there, and I wondered curiously at the meaning of it all. Life, that for three years had been something of a monotonous round of action for a boy of the frontier, was suddenly filling each day with events worth while. I wondered many things concerning Father Josef's presence there, but I had the grace to ask no questions as we five journeyed over the rolling green prairies of Kansas in the pleasant time of year which the Hopi calls the Moon of the Peach Blossom.

The priest appeared hardly a day older than when I had first seen him, and he chatted genially as we rode along.

"We are losing two of our stars," he said, with a gallant little bow. "Miss St. Vrain goes to St. Louis to relatives, I believe, and Little Blue Flower, eventually, to New Mexico. St. Ann's under Mother Bridget is doing a wonderful work among our people, but it is not often that a girl comes here from such a distance as New Mexico."

I tried to fancy what the Indian girl's thoughts might be as the priest said this, but her face, as usual, gave no clue to her mind's activity.

Where the Santa Fé Trail crossed the Wakarusa Father Josef left us to join a wagon-train going west. Sister Anita, who was hurrying back to Kentucky, she said, on some churchly errand, took a steamer at Westport Landing, and the three of us came to the Clarenden home on the crest of the bluff.

We had washed off our travel stains and come out on the veranda when we saw Beverly Clarenden standing in the sunlight, waiting for us. I had never seen him look so handsome as he did that day, dressed in the full regalia of the plains: a fringed and beaded buckskin coat, dark pantaloons held inside of high-topped boots, a flannel shirt, with a broad black silk tie fastened in a big bow at his throat, and his wide-brimmed felt hat set back from his forehead. Clean-shaven, his bright brown hair--a trifle long, after the custom of the frontier--flung back from his brow, his blooming face wearing the happy smile of youth, his tall form easily erect, he seemed the very embodiment of that defiant power that swept the old Santa Fé Trail clean for the feet of its commerce to run swiftly along. I am glad that I never envied him--brother of my heart, who loved me so.

He was not as surprised as I had been to find the grown-up girl instead of the little child. That wasn't Beverly's way.

"I'm mighty glad to meet you again," he said, with jaunty air, grasping Eloise by the hand. "You look just as--shall I say promising, as ever."

"I'm glad to see you, Beverly. You and Gail have been my biggest assets of memory these many years." Eloise was at ease with him in a moment. Somehow they never misunderstood each other.

"Oh, I'm always an asset, but Gail here gets to be a liability if you let him stay around too long."

"Here is somebody else. Don't you remember Little Blue Flower?" Eloise interrupted him.

"Little Blue Flower! Why, I should say I do! And are you that little blossom?"

Beverly's face beamed, and he caught the Indian girl's hand in both of his in a brotherly grasp. He wasn't to blame that nature had made him frank and unimaginative.

"I haven't forgotten the last time I saw your face in a wide crack between two adobe shacks. A 'flower in the crannied wall' in that 'pure water' sand-pile in New Mexico. I'd have plucked you out of the cranny right then, if old Rex Krane hadn't given us our 'forward march!' orders, and an Indian boy, ten feet high and sneaky as a cat, hadn't been lurking in the middle distance to pluck me as a brand for the burning. And now you are a St. Ann's girl, a good little Catholic. How did you ever get away up into Kansas Territory, anyhow?"

Beverly had unconsciously held the girl's hand as he spoke, but at the mention of the Indian boy she drew back and her bright face became expressionless.

Just then Mat Nivers joined us--Mat, whom the Lord made to smooth the way for everybody around her--and we sat down for a visit.

"We are all here, friends of my youthful days," Beverly went on, gaily. "Bill Banney and Jondo are down in the Clarenden warehouse packing merchandise for the Santa Fé trade. Even big black Aunty Boone, getting supper in there, is still a feature of this circus. If only that slim Yankee, Rex Krane, would appear here now. Uncle Esmond tells me he is to be here soon, and if all goes well he will go with us to Santa Fé again. How about it, Mat? Can't you hurry his coming a bit?"

But Mat was staring at the roadway leading to the ravine below us. Her wide gray eyes were full of eagerness and her cheeks were pink with excitement. For, sure enough, there was Rex Krane striding up the hill, with the easy swing of vigorous health. No longer the slender, slouching young idol of my boyhood days, with Eastern cut of garment and devil-may-care dejection of manner, all hiding a loving tenderness for the unprotected, and a daring spirit that scorned danger.

"It's the old settlers' picnic, eh! The gathering of the wild tribes--anything you want to call it, so we smoke the peace pipe."

Rex greeted all of us as we rushed upon him. But the first hands he reached for were the hands of our loving big sister Mat. And he held them close in his as he looked down into her beautiful eyes.

A sudden rush of memories brought back to me the long days on the trail in the middle '40's, and I knew now why he had always looked at Mat when he talked to all of us. And I used to think that he must have had a little sister like her. Now I knew in an instant why Mat could not meet his eyes to-day with that unconcern with which she met them when she was a child to me, and he, all of five years ahead of her, was very grown up. I knew more, for I had entered a new land myself since the hour by the shimmering Flat Rock in the Moon of the Peach Blossom, and I was alive to every tint and odor and musical note for every other wayfarer therein.

That was a glorious week that followed, and one to remember on the long trail days coming to us. I have no quarrel with the happy youth of to-day, but I feel no sense of loss nor spirit of envy when they tell me--all young people are my friends--when they tell me of golf-links and automobile rides, or even the daring hint of airplanes. To the heart of youth the gasolene-motor or the thrill of the air-craft to-day is no more than the Indian pony and the uncertain chance of the crude old canoe on the clear waters of the Big Blue when Kansas City was a village and the Kansas prairies were in their virgin glory.

Bill Banney had come out of the Mexican War, no longer an adventure lover, but a seasoned frontiersman. His life knew few of the gentler touches. He gave it to the plains, where so many lives went, unhonored and unsung, into the building of an enduring empire.

We would have included him in all the frolic of that wonderful week in the Moon of the Peach Blossom--but he gave us no opportunity to do so. And we were young, and the society of girls was a revelation to us. So with the carelessness of youth we forgot him. We forgot many things that week that, in Heaven's name, we had cause enough to remember in the years that followed after.

"There's a theatrical troupe come up from St. Louis to play here to-night," Rex Krane announced, after supper. "Mat, will you let me take you down to see the villain get what's due all villains? Then if we have to kill off Gail and Bev, it will not be so awkward."

"Can't we all go?" Mat suggested.

"Never mind us, Lady Nivers. Little Blue Flower, may I have the pleasure of your company? I need protection to-night," Beverly said, with much ceremony.

Little Blue Flower was sitting next to him, or it might not have begun that way.

"Oh, say yes. He's no poorer company than that company of actors down town," Rex urged.

The Indian girl assented with a smile.

She did not smile often and when she did her eyes were full of light, and her red lips and perfect white teeth were beautiful enough for a queen to envy.

"Little Lees, it seems you are doomed to depend on Gail or jump in the Kaw. I'd prefer the Kaw myself, but life is full of troubles. One more can be endured." Rex had turned to Eloise St. Vrain.

"Seems to me, having first choice, you might have been more considerate of my lot yourself," Eloise declared.

"He was. He saved you from a worse fate when he chose Mat," I broke in.

"May we have a song by the choir?" Beverly interrupted, and with his full bass voice he began to roar our some popular tune of that time.

And it went on as it began, the rambles about the rugged bluffs and picturesque ravines, where to-day the hard-surfaced Cliff Drive makes a scenic highway through the beauty spots of a populous city; the daring canoe rides on the rivers; the gatherings of the young folk in the town; and the long twilight hours on the crest of the bluff overlooking the two great waterways. And as by the first selection, Beverly and Little Blue Flower were companions. Nobody could be unhappy with Bev, least of all the shy Indian girl with a face full of sunshine, now. And I? I walked a pathway strewn with rose petals because the golden-haired Little Lees was beside me. Each day was a frolic day for us, teasing one another and making a joke of life, and for the morrow we took no thought at all.

One evening Eloise St. Vrain and I sat together on the bluff. It was the twilight hour, and all the far valley of the Kaw was full of iridescent misty lights, with gold-tipped clouds of pale lavender above, and the glistening silver of the river below. We could hear Beverly and Little Blue Flower laughing together in a big swing among the maples. Aunty Boone was crooning some African melodies in the bushes half-way down the slope. Rex and Mat had gone to the ravine below to meet Uncle Esmond.

"Little Lees, the first time I ever saw you you were away out there in such a misty light as that, and I saw only your hair and your eyes then, but as clearly as I see them now."

Eloise turned questioningly toward me, and the light in her dark eyes thrilled to the heart of me. In all her stay with us I had hardly spoken earnestly of anything before.

"When was that Gail?" she asked, the frivolous spirit gone from her, too.

"When I was a little boy, one day at Fort Leavenworth. And when I caught sight of you at the door of old San Miguel I knew you," I replied.

The girl turned her face toward the west again and was silent. I felt my cheeks flush hotly. I had made her think I was only a dream-sick fool, when I had told her of the sacredest moment of my life, and I had for the minute foolishly felt that she might understand. How could I know that it was I who could not understand?

At last she looked up with a smile as full of mischief as on that day when she had called me a big brown bob-cat.

"You must have been having a nightmare in your sleep," she declared.

"I think I was," I replied, testily. "Let me tell you something, Little Lees, something really important."

"I don't believe you know one important thing," Eloise replied, "but I'll listen, and then if it is I'll tell you something more important."

"I'm willing to hear it now. Tell me first," I replied, wondering the while how nature, that gives rough-hewn bearded faces to men, could make a face so daintily colored, in its youthful roundness, as hers.

"I'm going to start to St. Louis day after to-morrow at six o'clock in the morning. Isn't that important?"

Was there a real earnestness under the lightly spoken words, or did I imagine it so? If I had only made sure then--but I was young.

"Important! It's a tragedy! I start west in three days, at eight o'clock in the morning," I said, carelessly.

Sometimes the gray shadows fall on us when neither sunlight nor moonlight nor starlight is dimmed by any film of vapor. They fell on me then, and I shivered in my soul. How could I speak otherwise than carelessly and not show what must not be known? And how could the girl beside me know that I was speaking thus to keep down the shiver of that cold shadow? I suppose it must always be the same old story, year after year--

till the leaves of the judgment book unfold.

"What was that important something you were going to tell me? What Mat told me last night when we were watching the moon rise?" Eloise asked.

"That Rex and Mat are going to be married to-morrow evening at early candle-lighting--'early mosquito-biting,' Bev calls it. Rex has loved Mat since the day when he joined our little wagon-train out of a foolish sort of notion that he could protect us children, otherwise his life was useless to him. But something in his own boyhood made him pity all orphan children. I think it was through neglect in childhood he became an invalid at nineteen. He doesn't show the marks of it now."

I paused and looked at the young girl beside me, whose eyes were like stars in the deepening gloom of the evening. It was delicious to have her look at me and listen to me. It was delicious to live in a rose-hued twilight, and I forgot the chill of that gray shadow lurking near.

The next evening was entrancing with the soft air of spring, a night made purposely for brides. The wedding itself was simple in its appointments, as such events must needs be in the frontier years. All day we had worked to decorate the plain stone house, which the deftness of Little Blue Flower and the artistic touch of Little Lees turned into a spring bower, with trailing vines and blossoms everywhere.

Mat's wedding-gown was neither new nor elaborate, for the affair had been too hastily decided on, but Eloise had made it bride-like by draping a filmy veil over Mat's bright brown hair, and Little Blue Flower had brought her long strands of turquoise beads, "old and borrowed and blue," to fulfil the needs of every bride.

In the bridal party Beverly and I walked in front, followed by the two girls in the white Greek robes which they had worn at the school frolic at St. Ann's, and wearing their headbands, the one of silver and turquoise, the other of silver and coral. Then came Rex Krane and Bill Banney. Poor Bill! Nobody guessed that night that the bridal blossoms were flowers on the coffin of his dead hope. And last of all, Esmond Clarenden and Mat Nivers, with shining eyes, leaning on his arm. I had never seen Uncle Esmond in evening dress before, nor dreamed how splendid a figure he could make for a drawing-room in the costume in which he was so much at ease. But the handsomest man of all the large company gathered there that night was Jondo, big, broad-shouldered Jondo, his deep-blue eyes bright with joy for these two. And in the background was Aunty Boone, resplendent in a new red calico besprinkled with her favorite white dots, her head turbaned in a yellow silk bandana, and about her neck a strand of huge green glass beads. Her eyes glistened as she watched that night's events, and her comfortable ejaculations of approval were like the low purr of a satisfied cat. Then came the solemn pledges, the benediction and congratulations. There was merrymaking and singing, cake and unfermented wine of grapes for refreshing, and much good will that night.

When the guests were gone and the lights, save one kitchen candle, were all out, I had slipped from the dining-room with the last burden of dishes, when I paused a minute beside the open kitchen window to let the midnight breeze cool my face.

On the side porch, a little affair made to shelter the doorway, I saw Beverly Clarenden and Little Blue Flower. He was speaking gently, but with his blunt frankness, as he patted the two brown hands clinging to his arm. The Indian girl's white draperies were picturesque anywhere. In this dramatic setting they were startlingly beautiful, and her face, outlined in the dim light, was a thing rare to see. I could not hear her words, but her soft Hopi voice had a tender tone.

I was waiting to let them pass in when I heard Beverly's voice, and I saw him bend over the little maiden, and, putting one arm around her, he drew her close to him and kissed her forehead. I knew it was a brother's sympathetic act--and all men know how dangerous a thing that is; that there are no ties binding brother to sister except the bonds of kindred blood. The girl slipped inside the dining-room door, and a minute later a candle flickered behind her bedroom window-blind in the gable of the house. I waited for Beverly to go, determined never to mention what I had seen, when I caught the clear low voice whose tones could make my pulse thresh in its walls.

"Beverly, Beverly, it breaks my heart--" I lost the remainder of the sentence, but Beverly's words were clear and direct and full of a frank surprise.

"Eloise, do you really care?"

I turned away quickly that I might not hear any more. The rest of that night I sat wide awake and staring at the misty valley of the Kaw, where silvery ripples flashed up here and there against the shadowy sand-bars.

* * * * *

The steamboat for St. Louis left the Westport Landing wharf at six o'clock in the morning, before the mists had lifted over the big yellow Missouri. From our bluff I saw the smoke belch from its stacks as it pulled away and started down-stream; but only Uncle Esmond and Jondo waited to wave good-by to the sweet-faced girl looking back at them from its deck. Beverly had overslept, and Little Blue Flower had left an hour earlier with a wagon-train starting west toward Council Grove. In her room lay the white Grecian robe and the headband of wrought silver with coral pendants. On the little white pin-cushion on the dressing-table the bright pin-heads spelled out one Hopi word that carries all good will and blessing

LOLOMI.

Twenty-four hours later Rex Krane left his bride, and he and Bill Banney and Beverly and I, under command of Jondo, started on our long trip overland to Santa Fé. And two of us carried some memories we hoped to lose when new scenes and certain perils should surround us.

---

XI

"OUR FRIENDS--THE ENEMY"

And you all know security
Is mortal's chiefest enemy.
SHAKESPEARE.

In St. Louis and Kansas City men of Esmond Clarenden's type were sending out great caravans of goods and receiving return cargoes across the plains--pioneer trade-builders, uncrowned sovereigns of national expansion--against whose enduring power wars for conquest are as flashlight to daylight. And Beverly Clarenden and I, with the whole battalion of plainsmen--"bull-whackers," in the common parlance of the Santa Fé Trail--who drove those caravans to and fro, may also have been State-builders, as Uncle Esmond had declared we would be. Yet we hardly looked like makers of empire in those summer days when we followed the great wagon-trains along the prairies and over the mountain passes.

Two of us had come home from school hilariously eager for the trail service. But the silent plains made men thoughtful and introspective. Days of endless level landscapes under wide-arching skies, and nights in the open beneath the everlasting silent stars, give a man time to get close to himself, to relive his childhood, to measure human values, to hear the voice in the storm-cloud and the song of low-purring winds, to harden against the monotonous glare of sunlight, to defy the burning heat, and to feel--aye, to feel the spell of crystal day-dawns and the sweetness of velvet-shadowed twilights. Beverly and I were typical plainsmen in that we never spoke of these things to each other--that is not the way of the plainsman.

Our company had been organized at Council Grove--three trains of twenty-six wagons each, drawn by three or four spans of mules or yoke of oxen, guarded by eightscore of "bull-whackers." And there were a dozen or more ponies trained for swift riding in cases of emergency. There were also half a dozen private outfits under protection of the large body.

The usual election before starting had made Jondo captain of the whole company. His was the controlling type of spirit that could have bent a battalion or swayed a Congress. For all the commanders and lawmakers of that day were not confined to the army and to Congress. Some of them escaped to the West and became sovereigns of service there. And Jondo had need for an intrepid spirit to rule that group of men, as that journey across the plains proved.

On the day before we left Council Grove he was sitting with the heads of the other wagon-trains under a big oak-tree, perfecting final plans for the journey.

"Gail, I want you to sign some papers here," he said. "It is the agreement for the trip among the three companies owning the trains."

I read aloud the contract setting forth how one Jean Deau, representing Esmond Clarenden, of Kansas City, with Smith and Davis, representing two other companies from St. Louis, together agreed to certain conditions regarding the journey.

Smith and Davis had already signed, and as I took the pen, a white-haired old trapper who was sitting near by burst out:

"Jean Deau! Jean Deau! Who the devil is Jean Deau?"

Jondo did not look up, but the lines hardened about his mouth.

"It's a sound. Don't get in the way, old man. Go ahead, Clarenden," Smith commanded.

Few questions were asked in those days, for most men on the plains had a history, and it was what a man could do here, not what he had done somewhere else, that counted.

So I, representing Esmond Clarenden, signed the paper and the two managers hurried away. But the old trapper sat staring at Jondo.

"Say, I'm gittin' close to the end of the trail, and the divide ain't fur off for me. D'ye mind if I say somethin'?" he asked at last.

Jondo looked up with that smile that could warm any man's heart.

"Say on," he commanded, kindly.

"You aint never signin' your own name nowhere, it sorter seems."

Jondo shook his head.

"Didn't you and this Clarenden outfit go through here 'bout ten years ago one night? Some Mexican greasers was raisin' hell and proppin' it up with a whisky-bottle that night, layin' fur you vicious."

Jondo smiled and nodded assent.

"Well, them fellers comin' in had a bargain with a passel of Kioways to git you plenty if they missed you themselves; to clinch their bargain they give 'em a pore little Hopi Injun girl they'd brung along with a lot of other Mexicans and squaws."

"I had that figured out pretty well at the time," Jondo said, with a smile.

"But, Jean Deau--" the old man began.

"No, Jondo. Go on. I'm busy," Jondo interrupted.

The old man's watery eyes gleamed.

"I just want to say friendly-like, that them Kioways never forgot the trick you worked on 'em, an' the tornydo that busted 'em at Pawnee Rock they laid to your bad medicine. They went clare back to Bent's Fort to fix you. Them and that rovin' bunch of Mexicans that scattered along the trail with 'em in time of the Mexican War. They'd 'a' lost you but fur a little Apache cuss they struck out there who showed 'em to you."

Jondo looked up quickly now. Santan, Beverly's "Satan," whom our captain had defended, flashed to my mind, but I knew by Jondo's face that he did not believe the old trapper's story.

"Them Kioways is still layin' fur you ever' year, I tell you, an' they're bound to git you sooner or later. I'm tellin' ye in kindness."

The old man's voice weakened a little.

"And I'm taking you in kindness," Jondo said. "You may be doing me a great service."

"I shore am. Take my word an' keep awake. Keep awake!"

In spite of his drink-bleared eyes and weakened frame, there was a hint of the commander in him, a mere shadow of the energy that had gone years ago into the wild, solitary life of the trapper who foreran the trail days here.

"One more trip to the ha'nts of the fur-bearin' and it's good-by to the mountain trails and the river courses fur me," he said, as he rose and stalked unsteadily away, and--I never saw him again.

At daybreak the next morning we were off for Santa Fé. Our wagons, loaded with their precious burdens, moved forward six abreast along the old sun-flower bordered trail. Morning, noon, and evening, pitching camp and breaking camp, yoking oxen and harnessing mules, keeping night vigil by shifts, hunting buffalo, killing rattlesnakes, watching for signs of hostile Indians, meeting incoming trains, or solitary trappers, at long intervals, breathing the sweet air of the prairies, and gathering rugged strength from sleep on the wholesome earth--these things, with the jolliest of fellowship and perfect discipline of our captain, Jondo, made this hard, free life of the plains a fascinating one. We were unshaven and brown as Indians. We lost every ounce of fat, but we were steel-sinewed, and fear, that wearing element that disintegrates the soul, dropped away from us early on the trail.

But when the full moon came sweeping up the sky, and all the prairie shadows lay flat to earth under its surge of clear light, in the stillness of the great lonely land, then the battle with home-sickness was not the least of the plains' perils.

One midnight watch of such a night, Jondo sat out my vigil with me. Our eighty or more wagons were drawn up in a rude ellipse with the stock corraled inside, for we were nearing the danger zone. And yet to-night danger seemed impossible in such a peaceful land under such clear moonlight.

"Gail, you were always a far-seeing youngster, even in your cub days," Jondo said, after we had sat silent for a long time. "We are moving into trouble from to-night, and I'll need you now."

"What makes you think so, Jondo?" I asked.

"That train we met going east at noon."

"Mexicans with silver and skins worth double our stuff, what have they to do with us?" I inquired.

"One of the best men I have ever known is a Mexican in Santa Fé. The worst man I have ever known is an American there. But I've never yet trusted a Mexican when you bunch them together. They don't fit into American harness, and it will be a hundred years before the Mexican in our country will really love the Stars and Stripes. Deep down in his heart he will hate it."

"I remember Felix Narveo and Ferdinand Ramero mighty well," I commented.

Jondo stared at me.

"Can't a boy remember things?" I inquired.

"It takes a boy to remember; and they grow up and we forget they have had eyes, ears, feelings, memories, all keener than we can ever have in later years. Gail, the Mexican train comes from Felix Narveo, and Narveo is a man of a thousand. They bring word, however, that the Kiowas are unusually friendly and that we have nothing to fear this side of the Cimarron. They don't feel sure of the Utes and Apaches."

"Good enough!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, only they lie when they say it. It's a trap to get us. No Kiowa on the plains will let a Clarenden train through peacefully, because we took their captive, Little Blue Flower. It's a hatred kept alive in the Kiowas by one man in Santa Fé through his Mexican agents with Narveo's train."

"And that man is Ramero?" I questioned.

"That man is Ramero, and his capacity for hate is appalling. Gail, there's only one thing in the world that is stronger than hate, and that is love."

Jondo looked out over the moonlit plains, his fine head erect, even in his meditative moods.

"When a Mexican says a Kiowa has turned friendly, don't believe him. And when a Kiowa says it himself--kill him. It's your only safe course," Jondo said, presently.

"Jondo, why does Ramero stir up the Indians and Mexicans against Uncle Esmond?" I asked.

"Because Clarenden drove him into exile in New Mexico before it was United States territory," Jondo replied.

"What did he do that for?" I asked.

"Because of what Ramero had done to me," Jondo replied.

"Well, New Mexico is United States territory now. What keeps this Ramero in Santa Fé, if he is there?"

"I keep him there. It's safer to know just where a man like that is. So I put a ring around the town and left him inside of it."

Jondo paused and turned toward me.

"Yonder comes Banney to go on guard now. Gail, I'll tell you all about it some day. I couldn't on a night like this."

The deep voice sent a shiver through me. There was a pathos in it, too manly for tears, too courageous for pity.

The days that followed were hard ones. Word had gotten through the camp that the Indians were very friendly, and that we need not be uneasy this side of the Cimarron country. Smith and Davis agreed with the train captain, Jondo, in taking no chances, but most of the one hundred sixty bull-whackers stampeded like cattle against precaution, and rebelled at his rigid ruling. He had begun to tighten down upon us as we went farther and farther into the heart of a savage domain. The night guard was doubled and every precaution for the stock was demanded, giving added cause for grumbling and muttered threats which no man had the courage to speak openly to Jondo's face. I knew why he had said that he would need me. Bill Banney was always reliable, but growing more silent and unapproachable every day. Rex Krane's mind was on the girl-wife he had left in the stone house on the bluff above the Missouri. Beverly was too cock-sure of himself and too light-hearted, too eager for an Indian fight. Jondo could counsel with Smith and Davis of the St. Louis trains, but only as a last resort would he dictate to them. So he turned to me.

We were nearing Pawnee Rock, but as yet no hint of an Indian trail could we find anywhere. Advance-guards and rear-guards had no news to report when night came, and the sense of security grew hourly. The day had been very warm, but our nooning was shortened and we went into camp early. Everything had gone wrong that day: harness had broken; mules had grown fractious; a wagon had upset on a rough bit of the trail; half a dozen men, including Smith and Davis of the St. Louis trains, had fallen suddenly ill; drinking-water had been warm and muddy; and, most of all, the consciousness of wide-spread opposition to Jondo's strict ruling where there were no signs of danger made a very ugly-spirited group of men who sat down together to eat our evening meal. Bets were openly made that we wouldn't see a hostile redskin this side of Santa Fé. Covert sneers pointed many comments, and grim silence threatened more than everything else. Jondo's face was set, but there was a calmness about his words and actions, and even the most rebellious that night knew he was least afraid of any man among us.

At midnight he wakened me. "I want you to help me, Gail," he said. "The Kiowas will gather for us at Pawnee Rock. They missed us there once because they were looking for a big train, and it was there we took their captive girl. The boys are ready to mutiny to-night. I count on you to stand by me." Stand by Jondo! In my helpless babyhood, my orphaned childhood, my sturdy growing years toward young manhood, Jondo had been father, mother, brother, playmate, guardian angel. I would have walked on red-hot coals for his sake.

"I want you to slip away to-night, when Rex and Bev are on guard, and find out what's over that ridge to the north. Don't come back till you do find out. We'll get to Pawnee Rock to-morrow. I must know to-night. Can you do it? If you aren't back by sunrise, I'll follow your trail double quick."

"I'll go," I replied, proud to show both my courage and my loyalty to my captain.

The night was gray, with a dying moon in the west, and the north ridge loomed like a low black shadow against the sky. There was a weird chanting voice in the night wind, pouring endlessly across the open plains. And everywhere an eyeless, voiceless, motionless land, whereon my pony's hoof-beats were big and booming. Nature made my eyes and ears for the trail life, and matched my soul to its level spaces. To-night I was alert with that love of mastery that made me eager for this task. So I rode forward until our great camp was only a dull blot on the horizon-line, melting into mere nothingness as it grew farther away. And I was alone on the earth. God had taken out every other thing in it, save the sky over my head and the uneven short-grass sod under my feet.

On I went, veering to the northwest from instinct that I should find my journey's end soonest that way. Over the divide which hid the wide valley of the Arkansas, and into the deep draws and low bluffs of a creek with billowy hills beyond, I found myself still instinctively smelling my way. I grew more cautious with each step now, knowing that the chance for me to slip along unseen gave also the chance for an enemy to trail me unseen.

At last I caught that low breathing sound that goes with the sense of nearness to life. Leaving my pony by the stream, I climbed to the top of a little swell, and softly as a cat walks on a carpet, I walked straight into an Indian camp. It was well chosen for outlook near, and security from afar. There was a growing light in the sky that follows the darkness of moonset and runs before the break of dawn. Everything in the camp was dead still. I saw evidences of war-paint and a recent war-dance that forerun an Indian attack. I estimated the strength of the enemy--possibly four hundred warriors, and noted the symbols of the Kiowa tribe. Then, thrilled with pride at my skill and success, I turned to retrace my way to my pony--and looked full into the face of an Indian brave standing motionless in my path. A breath--and two more braves evolved out of gray air, and the three stood stock-still before me. Out of the tail of my eye, I caught sight of a drawn bow on either side of me. I had learned quickness with firearms years ago, but I knew that two swift arrows would cut my life-line before the sound of my ready revolver could break the stillness of the camp. Three pairs of snaky black eyes looked steadily at me, and I stared back as directly into them. Two arrow-points gently touched my ears. Behind me, a tomahawk softly marked a ring around my scalp outside of my hat. I was standing in a circle of death. At last the brave directly before me slowly drew up his bow and pointed it at me; then dropping it, he snapped the arrow shaft and threw away the pieces. Pointing to my cocked revolver, he motioned to me to drop it. At the same time the bows and tomahawks, of the other warriors were thrown down. It was a silent game, and in spite of the danger I smiled as I put down my firearms.

"Can't any of you talk?" I asked. "If you are friendly, why don't you say so?"

The men did not speak, but by a gesture toward the tallest tepee--the chief's, I supposed--I understood that he alone would talk to me.

"Well, bring him out." I surprised myself at my boldness. Yet no man knows in just what spirit he will face a peril.

One of the braves ran to the chief's tent, but the remaining five left me no chance for escape. It was slowly growing lighter. I thought of Jondo and his search at sunrise, and the moments seemed like hours. Yet with marvelous swiftness and stillness a score of Indians with their chief were mounted, and I, with my pony in the center of a solid ring, was being hurried away, alive, with friendly captors daubed with war-paint.

There was a growing light in the east, while the west was still dark. I thought of the earth as throwing back the gray shadowy covers from its morning face and piling them about its feet; I thought of some joke of Beverly's; and I wondered about one of the oxen that had seemed sick in the evening. I tried to think of nothing and a thousand things came into my mind. But of life and death and love and suffering, I thought not at all.

Meantime, Jondo waited anxiously for my coming. Rex and Beverly had gone to sleep at the end of their watch and nobody else in camp knew of my going. At dawn a breeze began to swing in from the north, and with its refreshing touch the weariness and worries of yesterday were swept away. Everybody wakened in a good humor. But Jondo had not slept, and his face was sterner than ever as the duties of the day began.

Before sunrise I began to be missed.

"Where's Gail?" Bill Banney was the first to ask.

"That's Clarenden's job, not mine," another of the bull-whackers resented a command of Jondo's.

"Gail! Gail! Anybody on earth seen Gail Clarenden this morning?" came from a far corner of the camp.

"Have you lost a man, Jondo?" Smith, still sick in his wagon, inquired.

And the sun was filling the eastern horizon with a roseate glow. It would be above the edge of the plains in a little while, and still I had not returned.

Breakfast followed, with many questions for the absent one. There was an eagerness to be off early and an uneasiness began to pervade the camp.

"Jondo, you'll have to dig up Gail now. I saw him putting out northwest about one o'clock," Rex Krane said, aside to the train captain.

"If he isn't here in ten minutes. I'll have to start out after him," Jondo replied.

Ten minutes are long to one who waits. The boys were ready for the camp order. "Catch up!" to start the harnessing of teams. But it was not given. The sun's level rays, hot and yellow, smote the camp, and a low murmur ran from wagon to wagon. Jondo waited a minute longer, then he climbed to the wagon tongue at the head of the ellipse of vehicles, his commanding form outlined against the open space, his fine face illumined by the sunlight.

"Boys, listen to me."

Men listened when Jondo spoke.

"I believe we are in danger, but you have doubted my word. I leave the days to prove who is right. At midnight I sent Gail Clarenden to find out what is beyond that ridge--a band of men running parallel with us that shadows us day by day. If he is not here in ten minutes, we must go after him."

A hush fell on the camp. The oxen switched at the first nipping insects of the morning, and the ponies and mules, with that horse-sense that all horsemen have observed in them at times, stood as if waiting for a decision to be made.

Beverly Clarenden was first to speak.

"If anybody goes after Gail, it's me , and I'll not stop till I get him," he cried, all the brotherly love of a lifetime in his ringing voice.

"And me!" "And me!" "And me!" came from a dozen throats. Plainsmen were always the truest of comrades in the hour of danger. Nobody questioned Jondo's wisdom now. All thought was for the missing man.

Rex Krane had leaped up on the wagon next to Jondo's and stood gazing toward the northwest. At this outburst of eagerness he turned to the crowd in the corral.

"You wait five minutes and Gail will be here. He's gettin' into sight out yonder now," he declared.

Another shout, a rush for the open, and a straining of eyes to make sure of the lone rider coming swiftly down the trail I had followed out at midnight. And amid a wild swinging of hats and whoops of joy I rode into camp, hugged by Beverly and questioned by everybody, eager for my story from the time I left the camp until I rode into it again.

"They took me to Pawnee Rock before they let me know anything, except that my scalp would hang to the old chief's war-spear if I tried one eye-wink to get away from them. But they let me keep my gun, and I took it for a sign," I told the company. "They had a lot of ceremony getting seated, and then, without any smoking-tobacco or peace-pipe, they gave their message."

"Who said the Kiowas wasn't friendly? They already sent us word enough," one man broke in.

Jondo's face, that had been bright and hopeful, now grew grave.

"They said they mean us no harm. They were grateful to Uncle Sam for the favors he had given them. That the prairies were wide, and there was room for all of us on it," I continued. "In proof, they said that we would pass that old rock to-day unharmed where once they would have counted us their enemies. And they let me go to bring you all this word. They are going northeast into the big hunting-ground, and we are safe."

No man could take defeat better than Jondo.

"I am glad if I was wrong in my opinion," he said. "Fifteen years on that trail have made me cautious. I shall still be cautious if I am your captain. They did not smoke the peace-pipe. In my judgment the Kiowas lied. Two or three days will prove it. Choose now between me and my unchanged opinion, and some new train captain."

"Oh, every man makes some bad guesses, Jondo. We'll keep you, of course, and it's a joke on you, that's all." So ran the comment, and we hurriedly broke camp and moved on.

But with all of our captain's anxiety Pawnee Rock stood like a protecting shield above us when we camped at its base, and the long bright days that followed were full of a sense of security and good cheer as we pulled away for the Cimarron crossing of the Arkansas River, miles ahead.

All day Jondo rode wide of the trail, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, watching for signs of an enemy. And the bluff, jovial crowd of bull-whackers laughed together at his holding on to his opinion out of sheer stubbornness.

On the second night he asked for a triple guard and nobody grumbled, for everybody really liked the big plainsman and they could afford to be good-natured with him, now that he was unquestioningly in the wrong.

The camp was in a little draw running down to the river, bordered by a mere ripple of ground on either side, growing deeper as it neared the stream and flattening out toward the level prairie in its upper portion. In spite of the triple guard, Jondo did not sleep that night; and, strangely enough, I, who had been dull to fear in the hands of the Indians two nights before, felt nervous and anxious, now when all seemed secure.

Just at daybreak a light shower with big bullet-like drops of rain pattered down noisily on our camp and a sudden flash of lightning and a thunderbolt startled the sleepy stock and brought us to our feet, dazed for an instant. Another light volley of rain, another sheet of lightning and roar of thunder, and the cloud was gone, scattering down the Arkansas Valley. But in that flash all of Jondo's cause for anxiety was justified. The widening draw was full of Kiowas, hideous in war-paint, and the ridges on either side of us were swarming with Indians beating dried skins to frighten and stampede our stock, and all yelling like fiends, while a perfect rain of arrows swept our camp. With the river below us full of holes and quicksands, our enemies had only to hold the natural defense on either side while they drove us in a harrowing wedge back to the water. If our ponies and mules should break from the corral they would rush for the river or be lost in the widening space back from the deeper draw, where a well-trained corps of thieves knew how to capture them. I had estimated the Kiowas' strength at four hundred, two nights before, which was augmented now by a roving band of Dog Indians--outcasts from all tribes, who knew no law of heaven or hell that they must obey. And so we stood, shocked wide awake, with the foe four to one, man for man against us.

Men remember details acutely in the face of danger. As I write these words I can hear the sound of Jondo's voice that morning, clear and strong above the awful din, for nature made him to command in moments of peril. In a flash we were marshalled, one force to guard the corral, one to seize and hold either bank and one to charge on the advance of the Indians down the draw. We were on the defensive, as our captain had planned we should be, and every man of us realized bitterly now how much he had done for us, in spite of our distrust of his judgment.

On came the yelling horde, with rifle-rip and singing arrow. And the sharp cry of pain and the fierce oath told where these shots had sped home. Four to one, with every advantage of well-laid plan of action against an unsuspecting sleeping force, the odds and gods were with them. Dark clouds hung overhead, but the eastern sky was aflame, casting a lurid glare across the edges of the draw as a stream of savages with painted faces and naked bedaubed bodies poured down against the corral. In an instant the chains and ropes holding the stock were severed, and our mules and oxen and ponies stampeded wildly. By some adroit movement they were herded over the low bank, and a cloud of dust hid the entire battleground as the animals, mad with fright and goaded by arrows, tossed against one another, stumbled blindly until they had cleared the ridge. A shriek of savage glee and the thunder of hoofs on the hard earth told how well the thing had been done and how furiously our animals were being whirled away.

"Go, get 'em, Gail! Stay by 'em! Run!"

Jondo's voice sounded far away, but my work was near. With a dozen bull-whackers I made a dash out of the draw and, circling wide, we rode like demons to outflank the cloud of dust that hid our precious property. On we swept, fleet and sure, in a mad burst of speed to save our own. We were gaining now, and turning the cloud toward the river. Another spurt, and we would have them checked, faced about, subdued. I saw the end, and as the boys swung forward I urged them on.

"To the river. To the river. Head 'em south!" I cried.

And Rex Krane, like a centaur, swirled by me to do the thing I ordered. Behind me rode Beverly Clarenden bareheaded, his face aglow with power. As I looked back the dust engulfed him for a moment, and then I heard an arrow sing, and a sharp cry of pain. The dust had lifted and Beverly and a huge Indian, the tallest I have ever seen, were grappling together, a scalping-knife gleaming in the morning light. I dashed forward and felled the savage with the butt of my revolver. He leaped to his feet and sprang at me just as Beverly, with unerring aim, sent a blaze of fire between us. As the savage fell again, my cousin seized his pony; and with an arrow still swinging to his arm, dashed into the chase, and left it only when the stock, with the loss of less than a fourth, was driven up the river's sandy bank and over the swell into the camp inclosure.

Meantime, Jondo at the front of his men charged into the very center of the savage battle-line as, furious for blood, they threshed across the narrow draw--the disciplined arm and courageous heart against a blood-thirsty foe. A charge, a falling back, another surge to win the lost ground, a steady holding on and sure advance, and then Jondo, with one triumphant shout of victory, struck the last fierce blow that sent the Kiowas into full flight toward the northwest, and the day was won.

Out by the river, a sudden dullness seized me. I lifted my eyes to see Beverly free and Rex directing the charge; cattle, mules, and ponies turned back toward safety, and something crawling and writhing about my feet; Jondo's great shout of victory far away, it seemed, miles and miles to the north; a cloud of dust sweeping toward me; the crimson east aflame like the Day of judgment; the dust cloud rolling nearer; the yellow sands and slow-moving waters of the Arkansas; and six silent stalwart Kiowa braves, with snaky black eyes, looking steadily at me. Shadows, and the dust cloud upon me. Then all was night.

---

XII

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE PLAINS

Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether,
But we do not fall on the neck, nor kiss when we come together.
--"A SONG OF THE ENGLISH."

The whole thing was clear now, clear as the big white day that suddenly beamed along the prairies, scattering the clouds into gray strands against the upper heavens. The treachery of the Kiowas had been cleverly executed. Word of their friendliness had come to us through the Mexican caravan which could have no object in deceiving us, since it was on its way to Kansas City to do business with the Clarenden house there. And Jondo had sent a spy by night into the Kiowa camp as if they were not to be trusted. Yet they had taken no offense; but, letting me keep my firearms, had led me into their council on the top of Pawnee Rock, where they had told me in clear English that they had nothing but love for the white brothers of the plains. And to prove it we should pass unharmed along the trail where once we had wronged them by stealing their captive. The prairies were wide enough for all of us and they had forgotten--as an Indian always forgets--all malice against us. They had sent me back to camp with greetings to my captain, and had gone on their way to the heart of the Grand Prairie in the northeast.

It was only Jondo, as he rode wide of the trail for two days, who could see any mark of an Indian's track. And we had not believed Jondo. We never made that mistake again: But trust in his shrewdness now, however, would not bring back the oxen lost and the mules and ponies captured by the thieving band of Dog Indians. But there was a greater loss than these. The Kiowas had come for revenge. It was blood, not plunder, they wanted. A dozen men with arrow wounds reported at roll call, and six men lay stark dead under the pitiless sky. Among them Davis of the St. Louis train, who had been too ill to take part in the struggle. One more loss was there to report, but it was not discovered until later.

Indians seldom leave their dead on the field of battle, but the blood-stained sod beside their fallen ponies told a story of heavy toll. Blood marked the trail of hoofprints to the northwest in their wild rout thither. One comrade they had missed in their flight. He lay down near the river where the ground had been threshed over by the stampeded stock. He must have been a giant in life, for his was the longest grave made in the prairie sod that day. At the river's edge the sands were pricked with hoofprints, where the struggle to carry away the dead seemed to have reached clear into the thin yellow current of the Arkansas, although no trail led out on the far side of the stream.

"That's the very copper cuss with yellow trimmings who had me down when that arrow stopped me," Beverly exclaimed. "He was seven feet tall and streaked with yellow just that way. I thought ten million rattlesnakes and eight billion polecats had hit me. His club was awful. Then I caught sight of old Gail's face in the dust-storm, coming back to help me. He gave the Indian one dose and got one back, a good hard bill, and then the dust closed in and Gail was off again to the northwest out there, like a hurricane. I could hear him a mile away. Couldn't I Gail? Where is Gail?"

Where?

"Oh, back there with the stock!"

No?

"Out there looking over the draw for things that's got all scattered."

No? Not there?

"Oh, he's getting breakfast. And we are all hungry enough to eat raw Kiowas now."

No? No?

"Gail would be helping the wounded, anyhow, or straightening out dead men's limbs. Poor fellows--to lose six! It's awful!"

No? No? No?

"Bathing in the river? Where? Over there across the sand-bar?"

Nowhere! Nowhere!

"By the eternal God, they've got him!" Jondo's agonized voice rang through the camp.

"We can take care of the wounded, and those fellows lying over there don't need us. But, oh, Gail! They'll torture him to death!" Rex Krane's voice choked and he ground his teeth.

"Gail, my Gail!" Beverly sat down white and desparingly calm--Beverly, whose up-bubbling spirits nobody could repress.

The others wrung their hands and cursed and groaned aloud. Only Bill Banney, the unimaginative and stern-hearted, stood motionless with set jaws and black-frowning brows. Bill, whom the plains had made hard and unfeeling.

"We won't give up Gail, will we, Bill?" Jondo spoke sternly, but his face--they said his face was bright with courage and that his eyes shone with the inspiration of his will. In all that crowd of eager, faithful men, he turned now to Bill Banney. Every man had his place on the plains, and Jondo out of the chrism of his own life-struggle knew that Bill was bearing a cross in silence, and that his was the martyr spirit that finds salvation only in deeds. Bill was the man for the place.

And so while straying animals were slowly recovered, while the camp was set in order, while the dead were laid with simple reverence in un-coffined graves, and the sick were crudely ministered to, while Beverly grew feverish and his arrow wound became a festering sore, and Rex Krane, master of the company, cared for every thing and everybody with that big mother-heart of his--Jondo and Bill Banney pushed alone across the desolate plains toward where the Smoky Hills wrapped in their dim gray-blue mist mark the low watershed that rims the western valley of the Kaw.

They went alone because skill, and not numbers, could save a captive from the hands of the Kiowas, and the sight of a force would mean death to the victim before he could be rescued.

A splash of water against a hot hand hanging down; a sense of light, of motion; a glimpse of coarse sands and thin straggling weeds beside the edge of the stream down which the pathway ran; a sharp aching at the base of the brain; an agony of strained muscles--thus slowly I came to my senses, to memory, to the knowledge that I was bound hand and foot to a pony's back; that the sun was hot, and the sands were hotter, and the glare on the waters blinding; that every splash of the pony's hoofs sent up glittering sparkles that stabbed my aching eyes like white-hot dagger-points; that the black and clotted dirt on the pony's shoulder was not mud, but blood; that before and behind were other splashing feet, all hiding the trail in the thin current of the wide old Arkansas; that the quick turns to follow the water and the need for speed gave no consideration to the helpless rider. The image of six pairs of snaky black eyes came to help the benumbed brain, and I knew with whom I was again captive. But there was no question about the friendly motive now, for there was no friendly motive now. And as we pushed on east, Jondo and Bill Banney were hurrying toward the northwest, and the space between us widened every minute. A wave of helplessness and despair swept over me; then a wild up-leaping prayer for deliverance to a far-away unpitying Heaven; a sudden sense of the futility of prayer in a land the Lord had forgotten; and then anger, hot and wholesome, and an unconquered, dominant will to gain freedom or to die game, swept every other feeling away, marvelously mastering the sense of pain that had ground mercilessly at every nerve. Then came that small voice which a man hears sometimes in the night stillness and sometimes in the blare of daylight wrangle. And all suddenly I knew that He who notes the sparrow's fall knew that I was alone with death, slow-lingering, inch-creeping death, out on that wide, lonely plain. The glare on the waters softened. The heat fell away. The despair and agony lifted. In all the world--my world--there was only one, God; not a far, unpitying, book-made Lord beyond the height of the glaring blue dome above me. God beside me on, the yellow waters of the Arkansas. His hand in my hot hand! His strength about me, invisible, unbreakable, infinite. When a man enters into that shielding Presence, nothing else matters.

I do not know how many miles we went down-stream, leaving no trail in the shallow water or along its hard-baked edges. But by the time we dropped that line I had begun to think coherently and to take note of everything possible to me, bound as I was, face downward, on the pony's back. It was when we had left the river that the hard riding began, and a merciful unconsciousness, against which I fought, softened some stretches of that long day's journey. We crossed the Santa Fé Trail and were pushing eastward out of sight of it to the north. No stop, no word, nothing but ride, ride, ride. Truly, I needed the Presence that went with me on the way.

At sunset we stopped, and I was taken from my pony and thrown to the ground. I managed, in spite of my bonds, to sit up and look about me.

We were on the top of Pawnee Rock. The heat of the day was spent and all the radiant tints of evening were making the silent prairies unspeakably beautiful. I do not know why I should have noted or remembered any of this, save that the mind sometimes gathers impressions under strange stress of suffering. I had had no food all day, and when our ponies stopped to drink, the agony of thirst was maddening. My tongue was swollen and my lips were cracked and bleeding. The leather thongs that bound me cut deep now. But--only the men who lived it can know what all this meant to the pioneer of the trail.

I have sat on the same spot at sunset many a time in these my sunset years; have gazed in tranquil joy at the whole panorama of the heavens that hang over the prairies in the opalescent splendor of the after-sunset hour; have looked out over the earthly paradise of waving grain, all glowing with the golden gleam of harvest, in the heart of the rich Kansas wheat-lands--and somehow I'm glad of soul that I foreran this day and--maybe--maybe I, too, helped somewhat to build the way--the way that Esmond Clarenden had helped to clear a decade before and was building then.

The six Indians gathered near me. One of them with unmerciful mercy loosened my bonds a trifle and gave me a sup of water. They did not want me to die too soon. Then they sat down to eat and drink. I did not shut my eyes, nor turn my head. I defied their power to crush me, and the very defiance gave me strength.

The chill air of evening blew about the brow of the rock, the twilight deepened, and down in the valley the shadows were beginning to hide the landscape. But the evening hour is long on the headlands. And there was ample time for another kind of council than that to which I had listened three mornings ago, when I had been set free to bear a friendly message to my chief.

They carried me--helpless in their hands--to where, unseen myself, and secured by rock fragment and rawhide thong, I could see far up the trail to the eastward. But I could give no signal of distress, save for the feeble call of my swollen, thirst-parched throat. Then the six bronze sons of the plains sat down before me, and looked at me. Looked! I never see a pair of beady black eyes to-day--and there are many such--that I do not long to kill somebody, so vivid yet is the memory of those murdering eyes looking at me.

At last they spoke--plains English, it is true--but clear to give their meaning.

"Chief Clarenden thinks Kiowas forget. He comes with little train across the prairies; Kiowas go to meet big train east and fight fair for Mexican brothers who hate Chief Clarenden. They do not stop to look for little sneaking coyotes when they seek big game. Clarenden steals away Kiowas' captive Hopi. Cheat Kiowas of big pay that white Medicine-man Josef would give for her. Mexican brothers and Kiowa tribe hate Clarenden. They take his son, you , to show Clarenden they can steal, too. Hopi girl! white brave! all the same."

The speaker's words came deliberately, and he gave a contemptuous wave of the hand as he closed. And the six sat silent for a time. Then another voice broke the stillness.

"Yonder is your trail. Chief Clarenden and big white chiefs go by to Santa Fé to buy and sell and grow rich. Indian sell captives to grow rich! No! White chief not let Indians buy and sell. But we do not kill white dogs. We leave you here to watch the trail for wagon-trains. They may not come soon. They may not see you nor hear you. You can see them pass on their way to get rich. You can watch them. Hopi girl would have brought us big money. We get no richer. Watch white men go get rich. You may watch many days till sun dries your eyes. Nothing trouble you here. Watch the trail. No wild animal come here. No water drown you here. No fine meat make you ache with eating here. Watch."

The six looked long at me, and as the light faded their black eyes and dark faces seemed like the glittering eyes and hooked bills of six great dark birds of prey.

When the last sunset glow was in the west the six rose up and walked backward, still looking at me, until they passed my range of vision and I could only feel their eyes upon me. Then I heard the clatter of ponies' feet on the hard rock, the fainter stroke on the thin, sandy soil, the thud on the thickening sod. Thump, thump, thump, farther and farther and farther away. The west grew scarlet, deepened to purple and melted at last into the dull gray twilight that foreruns the darkness of night. One ray of pale gold shimmered far along toward the zenith and lost itself in the upper heavens, and the stars came forth in the blue-black eastern sky. And I was alone with the Presence whose arm is never shortened and whose ear grows never heavy.

The trail to the east was only a dull line along the darker earth. I looked up at the myriad stars coming swiftly out of space to greet me. The starlit sky above the open prairie speaks the voice of the Infinite in a grandeur never matched on land or sea.

I thought of Little Blue Flower on that dim-lighted dawning when she had showed us her bleeding hands and lashed shoulders. And again I heard Beverly's boyish voice ring out:

"Let's take her and take our chances."

And then I was beside the glistening waters of the Flat Rock, and Little Blue Flower was there in her white Grecian robe and the wrought-silver headband with coral pendants. And Eloise. The golden hair, the soft dark eyes, the dainty peach-bloom cheek. Eloise whom I had loved always and always. Eloise who loved Beverly--good, big-hearted, sunny-faced Beverly, who never had visions. Any girl would love him. Most of all, Little Blue Flower. What a loving message she had left us in the one word, Lolomi . God pity her.

A thousand sharp pains racked my body. I tried to move. I longed for water. Then a merciful darkness fell upon me--not sleep, but unconsciousness. And the stars watched over me through that black night, lying there half dead and utterly alone.

Out to the northwest Jondo and Bill Banney rode long on the trail of the fleeing Kiowas. A picture for an artist of the West, these two rough men in the garb and mount and trappings of the plainsman, with eyes alert and strong faces, riding only as men can ride who go to save a life more eagerly than they would save their own. Not in rash haste, but with unchecked speed, losing no mark along the trail that should guide them more quickly to their goal, so they passed side by side, and neither said a word for hours along the way. Night came, and the needs of their ponies made them pause briefly. The trail, too, was harder to follow now. They might lose it in the darkness and so lose time. And those two men were going forth to victory. Not for one single heart-beat did they doubt their power to win, and the stead-fast assurance made them calm.

Daylight again, and a fresher trail made them hurry on. They drank at every stream and ate a snatch of food as they rode. They reached the hurriedly quitted Kiowa camp, and searched for the sign of vengeance on a captive there. Jondo knew those signs, and his heart beat high with hope.

"They haven't done it yet," he said to his companion. "They want to get away first. We are safe for a day."

And they rode swiftly on again.

"There's trouble here," Bill Banney declared as he watched the ground. "Too many feet. Could it be here?"

His voice was hardly audible. The two men halted and read the ground with piercing eyes. Something had happened, for there had been a circling and chasing in and out, and the sod was cut deep with hoofprints.

"No council nor ceremony, no open space for anything." Jondo would not even speak the word he was bound not to know.

"They've divided, Jondo. Here goes the big crowd, and there a smaller one," Bill declared.

"There were a lot of Dog Indians along for thieving. They've split here. Seem to have fussed a bit over it, too. And yonder runs the Kiowa trail to the north. Here go the Dogs east." Jondo replied. "We'll follow the Kiowas a spell," he added, after a thoughtful pause.

And again they were off. It was nearing noon now, and the trail was fresher every minute. At last the plainsmen climbed a low swell, halting out of sight on the hither side. Then creeping to the crest, they looked down on the Indian camp lying in a little dry valley of a lost stream whose course ran underground beneath them.

Lying flat on the ground, each with his head behind a low bush on the top of the swell, the men read the valley with searching eyes. Then Jondo, with Bill at his heels, slid swiftly down the slope.

"Gail Clarenden isn't there. We must take the trail east, and ride hard," he said, in a hoarse voice.

And they rode hard until they were beyond the range of the Kiowa outposts.

"What's your game, Jondo?" Bill asked, at length.

"They quarreled back there. Either the Dogs have Gail, or he's lost somewhere. The Kiowas are waiting for something. I can't quite understand, but we'll go on."

It was mid-afternoon and the two riders were faint from the hardship of the chase, but nobody who knew Jondo ever expected him to give up. The sun blazed down in the heat of the late afternoon, and the baking earth lay brown and dry beneath the heat-quivering air. There was no sound nor motion on the plains as the two faithful brothers--in purpose--followed hard on the track of the Dog Indian band.

Ahead of them the trail grew clearer until they saw the object of their chase, a band nearly a hundred strong, riding slowly, far ahead. Jondo and Bill halted and dropped to the ground. No cover was in sight, but if the Indians were unsuspicious they might not be discovered. On went the outlaw band, and the two white men followed after. Suddenly the Indians halted and grouped themselves together. The plainsmen watched eagerly for the cause. Out of the south six Indians came riding swiftly into view. They, too, halted, but neither group seemed aware that the two dull, motionless spots to the west were two white men watching them. White men didn't belong there.

The six rode forward. There was much parleying and pointing eastward. Then the six rode rapidly northward and the Dog band spurted east as rapidly.

Jondo looked at Bill.

"I see it clear as day. God help us not to be too late!" he cried, triumphantly, leaping to his saddle.

"What in Heaven's name to you see?" Bill asked eagerly.

"Gail wasn't with the Kiowas back there. He wasn't with the Dogs out yonder. Don't you remember he told us about six of the devils getting him in their friendly camp that morning? Yonder go the six. They have left Gail somewhere to die and they are cutting back to join the tribe. They have sent the Dogs on east. We'll run down this trail to the south. Hurry, Bill! For God's sake, hurry! It's the Lord's mercy they didn't see us back here."

That day Pawnee Rock saw the same old beauty of sunrise; the same clear sweeping breeze; the same long shining hours on the green prairies; but it all meant nothing to me, racked with pain and choking with thirst through the awful lengths of that summer day. Fitful unconsciousness, with fever and delirium, seeing mocking faces with snaky black eyes, looking long at me; food almost touching my lips, and floods of crystal waters everywhere just out of reach. I was on the bluff above the river at Fort Leavenworth again, watching for the fish on the sand-bars. They were Indians instead of fish, and they laughed at me and called me a big brown bob-cat. Then Mother Bridget and Aunty Boone would have come to me if I could only make them hear me. But the sun beat hot upon my burning face, and my swollen lips refused to moan.

And then I looked to the eastward and hope sprang to life within me. A wagon-train was crawling slowly toward Pawnee Rock. Tears drenched my eyes until I could hardly count the wagons--twenty, thirty, forty. It must be far in the afternoon now, and they might encamp here. But they seemed to be hurrying. I could not see for pain, but I knew they were near the headland now. I could hear the rattle of the wagon-chains and the tramp of feet and shouts of the bull-whackers. I tugged masterfully at my bonds. It was a useless effort. I tried to shout, but only low moans came forth from my parched lips. I strove and raged and prayed. The wagons hurried on and on, a long time, for there were many of them. Then the rattling grew fainter, the voices were far off, the thud of hoof-beats ceased. The train had passed the Rock, never dreaming that a man lay dying in sight of the succor they would so gladly have given.

The sun began to strike in level rays across the land, and the air was cooler, but I gave no heed to things about me. Death was waiting--slow, taunting death. The stars would be kind again to-night as they had been last night, but death crouching between me and the starlight, was slowly crawling up Pawnee Rock. Oh, so slowly, yet so surely creeping on. The sun was gone and a tender pink illumined the sky. The light was soft now. If death would only steal in before the glare burst forth. I forgot that night must come first. Pity, God of heaven, pity me!

And then the Presence came, and a sweet, low voice--I hear it still sometimes, when sunsets soften to twilight, " My presence shall go with thee , and I will give thee rest ." I felt a thrill of triumph pulse through my being. Unconquered, strong, and glad is he who trusts.

"I shall not die. I shall live, and in God's good time I shall be saved." I tried to speak the words, but I could not hear my voice. My pains were gone and I lay staring at the evening sky all mother-of-pearl and gold above my head. And on my lips a smile.

And so they found me at twilight, as a tired child about to fall asleep. They did not cry out, nor fall on my neck, nor weep. But Bill Banney's strong arms carried me tenderly away. Water, food, unbound swollen limbs, bathed in the warm Arkansas flow, soft grass for a bed, and the eyes of the big plainsman, my childhood idol, gentle as a girl's, looking unutterable things into my eyes.

I've never known a mother's love, but for that loss the Lord gave me--Jondo.

---

XIII

IN THE SHELTER OF SAN MIGUEL

Fear not, dear love, thy trial hour shall be
The dearest bond between my heart and thee.
--ALL THE YEAR ROUND.

When we reached the end of the trail and entered a second time into Santa Fé the Stars and Stripes were floating lazily above the Palace of the Governors. Out on the heights beyond the old Spanish prison stood Fort Marcy, whose battlements told of a military might, strong to control what by its strength it had secured. In its shadow was La Garita, of old the place of execution, against whose blind wall many a prisoner had started on the long trail at the word of a Spanish bullet, La Garita changed now from a thing of legalized horror to a landmark of history.

But the city itself seemed unchanged, and there was little evidence that Yankee thrift and energy had entered New Mexico with the new government. The narrow street still marked the trail's end before the Exchange Hotel. San Miguel, with its dun walls and triple-towered steeple, still good guard over the soul of Santa Fé, as it had stood for three sunny centuries. The Mexican still drove down the loaded burro-train of firewood from the mountains. The Indian basked in the sunny corners of the Plaza. The adobe dwellings clustered blindly along little lanes leading out to nowhere in particular. The orchards and cornfields, primitively cultivated, made tiny oases beside the trickling streams and sandy beds of dry arroyos. The sheep grazed on the scant grasses of the plain. The steep gray mesa slopes were splotched with clumps of evergreen shrubs and piñon trees. And over all the silent mountains kept watch.

The business house of Felix Narveo, however, did not share in this lethargy. The streets about the Plaza were full of Conestoga wagons, with tired ox-teams lying yoked or unyoked before them. Most of the traffic borne in by these came directly or indirectly to the house of Narveo. And its proprietor, the same silent, alert man, had taken advantage of a less restricted government, following the Mexican War, to increase his interests. So mine and meadow, flock and herd, trappers' snare and Indian loom and forge, all poured their treasures into his hands--a clearing-house for the products of New Mexico to swell the great overland commerce that followed the Santa Fé Trail.

For all of which the ground plan had been laid mainly by Esmond Clarenden, when with tremendous daring he came to Santa Fé and spied out the land for these years to follow.

A boy's memory is keen, and all the hours of that other journey hither, with their eager anticipation and youthful curiosity, and love of surprise and adventure, came back to Beverly Clarenden and me as we pulled along the last lap of the trail.

"Was it really so long ago, Bev, that we came in here, all eyes and ears?" I asked my cousin.

"No, it was last evening. And not an eyebrow in this Rip Van Winkle town has lifted since," Beverly replied. "Yonder stands that old church where the gallant knight on a stiff-legged pony spied Little Lees and knocked the head off of that tormenting Marcos villain, and kicked it under the door-step. Say, Gail, I'd like mighty well to see the grown-up Little Lees, wouldn't you? And I'd as soon this was Saint Louis as Santa Fé."

Since the night of Mat's wedding, I had been resolutely putting away all thought of Eloise St. Vrain. I belonged to the plains. All my training had been for this. I thought I was very old and settled now. But the mention of her pet name sent a thrill through me; and these streets of Santa Fé brought back a flood of memories and boyhood dreams and visions.

"Bev, how many auld-lang-syners do you reckon we'll meet in this land of sunshine and chilly beans?" I asked, carelessly.

"Well, how many of them do you remember, Mr. Cyclopedia of Prominent Men and Pretty Women?" Beverly inquired.

"Oh, there was Felix Narveo and Father Josef--and Little Blue Flower"--A shadow flitted across my cousin's face for a moment, leaving it sunny as ever again.

"And there was that black-eyed Marcos boy everywhere, and Ferdinand Ramero whom we were warned to step wide of," I went on.

"Oh, that tall thin man with blue-glass eyes that cut your fingers when he looked at you. Maybe he went out the back door of New Mexico when General Kearny peeped in at the front transom. There wasn't any fight in that man."

"Jondo says he is still in Santa Fé." Just as I spoke an Indian swept by us, riding with the ease of that born-to-the-horseback race.

"Beverly, do you remember that Indian boy that we saw out at Agua Fria?" I asked.

"The day we found Little Lees asleep in the church?" Beverly broke in, eagerly.

In our whole journey he had hardly spoken of Eloise, and, knowing Beverly as I did, I had felt sure for that reason that she had not been on his mind. Now twice in five minutes he had called her name. But why should he not remember her here, as well as I?

"Yes, I remember there was an Indian boy, sort of sneaky like, and deaf and dumb, that followed us until I turned and stared him out of it. That's the way to get rid of 'em, Gail, same as a savage dog," Beverly said, lightly.

"What if there are six of them all staring at you?" I asked.

"Oh, Gail, for the Lord's sake forget that!"

Beverly cried, affectionately. "When you've got an arrow wound rotting your arm off and six hundred and twenty degrees of fever in your blood, and the son of your old age is gone for three days and nights, and you don't dare to think where, you'll know why a fellow doesn't want to remember." There were real tears in the boy's eyes. Beverly was deeper than I had thought.

"Well, to change gradually, I wonder if that centaur who just passed us might be that same Indian of Agua Fria of long ago."

"He couldn't be," Beverly declared, confidently. "That boy got one square look at my eagle eye and he never stopped running till he jumped into the Pacific Ocean. 'I shall see him again over there.'" Half chanting the last words, Beverly, boy-hearted and daring and happy, cracked his whip, and our mule-team began to prance off in mule style the journey's latter end.

Oh, Beverly! Beverly! Why did that day on the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth and a boy's pleading face lifted to mine, come back to me at that moment? Strange are the lines of life. I shall never clearly read them all.

Down in the Plaza a tall, slender young man was sitting in the shade, idly digging at the sod with an open pocket-knife. There was something magnetic about him, the presence that even in a crowd demands a second look.

He was dressed in spotless white linen, and with his handsome mustache, his well-groomed black hair, and sparkling black eyes, he was a true type of the leisure son of the Spanish-Mexican grandee. He stared at our travel-stained caravan as it rolled down the Plaza's edge, but his careless smile changed to an insolent grin, showing all his perfect teeth as he caught sight of Beverly and me.

We laid no claims to manly beauty, but we were stalwart young fellows, with the easy strength of good health, good habits, clear conscience, and the frank faces of boys reared on the frontier, and accustomed to its dangers by men who defied the very devil to do them harm. But even in our best clothes, saved for the display at the end of the trail, we were uncouth compared to this young gentleman, and our tanned faces and hard brown hands bespoke the rough bull-whacker of the plains.

As our train halted, the young man lighted a cigar and puffed the smoke toward us, as if to ignore our presence.

"Its mamma has dressed it up to go and play in the park, but it mustn't speak to little boys, nor soil its pinafore, nor listen to any naughty words. And it couldn't hold its own against a kitten. Nice little clothes-horse to hang white goods on!"

Beverly had turned his back to the Plaza and was speaking in a low tone, with the serious face and far-away air of one who referred to a thing of the past.

"Bev, you are a mind-reader, a character-sketcher--" I began, but stopped short to stare into the Plaza beyond him.

The young man had sprung to his feet and stood there with flashing eyes and hands clenched. Behind him was the same young Indian who had passed us on the trail. He was lithe, with every muscle trained to strength and swiftness and endurance.

He had muttered a word into the young white man's ear that made him spring up. And while the face of the Indian was expressionless, the other's face was full of surprise and anger; and I recognized both faces in an instant.

"Beverly Clarenden, there are two auld-lang-syners behind you right now. One is Marcos Ramero, and the other is Santan of Bent's Fort," I said, softly.

Beverly turned quickly, something in his fearless face making the two men drop their eyes. When we looked again they had left the Plaza by different ways.

After dinner that evening Jondo and Bill Banney hurried away for a business conference with Felix Narveo. Rex and Beverly also disappeared and I was alone.

The last clear light of a long summer day was lingering over the valley of the Rio Grande, and the cool evening breeze was rippling in from the mountains, when I started out along the narrow street that made the terminal of the old Santa Fé Trail. I was hardly conscious of any purpose of direction until I came to the half-dry Santa Fé River and saw the spire of San Miguel beyond it. In a moment the same sense of loss and longing swept over me that I had fought with on the night after Mat's wedding, when I sat on the bluff and stared at the waters of the Kaw flowing down to meet the Missouri. And then I remembered what Father Josef had said long ago out by the sandy arroyo:

"Among friends or enemies, the one haven of safety always is the holy sanctuary."

I felt the strong need for a haven from myself as I crossed the stream and followed the trail up to the doorway of San Miguel.

The shadows were growing long, few sounds broke the stillness of the hour, and the spirit of peace brooded in the soft light and sweet air. I had almost reached the church when I stopped suddenly, stunned by what I saw. Two people were strolling up the narrow, crooked street that wanders eastward beside the building--a tall, slender young man in white linen clothes and a girl in a soft creamy gown, with a crimson scarf draped about her shoulders. They were both bareheaded, and the man's heavy black hair and curling black mustache, and the girl's coronal of golden braids and the profile of her fair face left no doubt about the two. It was Marcos Ramero and Eloise St. Vrain. They were talking earnestly; and in a very lover-like manner the young man bent down to catch his companion's words.

Something seemed to snap asunder in my brain, and from that moment I knew myself; knew how futile is the belief that miles of prairie trail and strength of busy days can ever cast down and break an idol of the heart.

In a minute they had passed a turn in the street, and there was only sandy earth and dust-colored walls and a yellow glare above them, where a moment ago had been a shimmer of sunset's gold.

"The one haven of safety always is the holy sanctuary."

Father Josef's words sounded in my ears, and the face of old San Miguel seemed to wear a welcoming smile. I stepped into the deep doorway and stood there, aimless and unthinking, looking out toward where the Jemez Mountains were outlined against the southwest horizon. Presently I caught the sound of feet, and Marcos Ramero strode out of the narrow street and followed the trail into the heart of the city.

I stared after him, noting the graceful carriage, the well-fitting clothes, and the proud set of the handsome head. There was no doubt about him. Did he hold the heart of the golden-haired girl who had walked into my life to stay? As he passed out of my sight Eloise St. Vrain came swiftly around the corner of the street to the church door, and stopped before me in wide-eyed amazement. Eloise, with her clinging creamy draperies, and the vivid red of her silken scarf, and her glorious hair.

"Oh, Gail Clarenden, is it really you?" she cried, stretching out both hands toward me with a glad light in her eyes.

"Yes, Little Lees, it is I."

I took both of her hands in mine. They were soft and white, and mine were brown and horny, but their touch sent a thrill of joy through me. She clung tightly to my hands for an instant. Then a deeper pink swept her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes and stepped back.

"They told me you were--lost--on the way; that some Kiowas had killed you."

She lifted her face again, and heaven had not anything better for me than the depths of those big dark eyes looking into mine.

"Who told you, Eloise?"

The girl looked over her shoulder apprehensively, and lowered her voice as she replied:

"Marcos Ramero."

"He's a liar. I am awfully alive, and Marcos Ramero knows I am, for he saw me and recognized me down in the Plaza this afternoon," I declared.

Just then the church door opened and a girl in Mexican dress came out. I did not see her face, nor notice which way she took, for a priest following her stepped between us. It was Father Josef.

"My children, come inside. The holy sanctuary offers you a better shelter than the open street."

I shall never forget that voice, nor hear another like it. Inside, the candles were burning dimly at the altar. The last rays of daylight came through the high south windows, touching the carved old rafters and gray adobe with a red glow. Long ago human hands, for lack of trowels, had laid that adobe surface on the rough stone--hands whose imprint is graven still on those crudely dented walls.

We sat down on a low seat inside of the doorway, and Father Josef passed up the aisle to the altar, leaving us there alone.

"Eloise, Marcos Ramero is your friend, and I beg your pardon for speaking of him as I did."

I resented with all my soul the thought of this girl caring for the son of the man who in some infamous way had wronged Jondo, but I had no right to be rude about him.

"Gail, may I say something to you?" The voice was as a pleading call and the girl's farce was full of pathos.

"Say on, Little Lees," was all that I could venture to answer.

"Do you remember the day you came in here and threw Marcos Ramero out of that door?"

"I do," I replied.

"Would you do it again, if it were necessary? I mean--if--" the voice faltered.

I had heard the same pleading tone on the night of Mat's wedding when Eloise and Beverly were in the little side porch together. I looked up at the red light on the old church rafters and the rough gray walls. How like to those hand-marked walls our memories are, deep-dented by the words they hold forever! Then I looked down at the girl beside me and I forgot everything else. Her golden hair, her creamy-white dress, and that rich crimson scarf draped about her shoulders and falling across her knees would have made a Madonna's model that old Giovanni Cimabue himself would have joyed to copy.

"Is it likely to be necessary? Be fair with me, Eloise. I saw you two strolling up that little goat-run of a street out there just now. Judging from the back of his head, Marcos looked satisfied. I shouldn't want to interfere nor make you any trouble," I said, earnestly.

"It is I who should not make you any trouble, but, oh, Gail, I came here this evening because I was afraid and I didn't know where else to go, and I found you. I thought you were dead somewhere out on the Kansas prairie. Maybe it was to help me a little that you came here to-night."

Her hands were gripped tightly and her mouth was firm-set in an effort to be brave.

"Why, Eloise, I'd never let Marcos Ramero, nor anybody else, make you one little heart-throb afraid. If you will only let me help you, I wouldn't call it trouble; I'd call it by another name." The longing to say more made me pause there.

The light was fading overhead, but the church lamps gave a soft glow that seemed to shield off the shadowy gloom.

"Father Josef came all the way from New Mexico to St. Ann's to have me come back here, and Mother Bridget sent Sister Anita, you remember her, up to St. Louis to come with me by way of New Orleans. I didn't tell you that I might be here when your train came in overland because--because of some things about my own people--"

The fair head was bowed and the soft voice trembled.

"Don't be afraid to tell me anything, Little Lees," I whispered, assuringly.

"I never saw my father, but my mother was very beautiful and loving, and we were so happy together. I was still a very little girl when she fell sick and they took me away from her. I never knew when she died nor where she was buried. Ferdinand Ramero had charge of her property. He controlled everything after she went away, and I have always lived in fear of his word. I am helpless when he commands, for he has a strange power over minds; and as to Marcos--you know what a little cat I was. I had to be to live with him. It wasn't until we were all at Bent's Fort that I got over my fear of you and Beverly. The day you threw Marcos out of here was the first time I ever had a champion to defend me."

I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her what I dared not think she would let me say. So I listened in sympathetic silence.

"Then came an awful day out at Agua Fria, and Father Josef took me in his arms as he would take a baby, and sang me to sleep with the songs my mother loved to sing. I think it must have been midnight when I wakened. It was dreary and cold, and Esmond Clarenden and Ferdinand Ramero were there, and Father Josef and Jondo."

And then she told me, as she remembered them, the happenings of that night at Agua Fria, the same story that Jondo told me later. But until that evening I had known nothing of how Eloise had come to us.

"You know the rest," Eloise went on "I have had a boarding-school life, and no real friends, except the Clarenden family, outside of these schools."

"You poor little girl! One of the same Clarenden family is ready to be your friend now," I said, tenderly, remembering keenly how Uncle Esmond and Jondo had loved and protected three orphan children.

"The Rameros think nobody but a Ramero can do that now. Marcos is very much changed. He has been educated in Europe, is handsome, and courtly in his manners, and as his father's heir he will be wealthy. He came to-night to ask me, to urge and plead with me, to marry him." Eloise paused.

"Do you need the defense of a bull-whacker of the plains against these things?" I asked.

"Oh, I could depend on myself if it were only Marcos. He comes with polished ways and pleasing words," Eloise replied. "It is his father's iron fist back of him that strikes at me through his graciousness. He tells me that all the St. Vrain money, which he controls by the terms of my father's will, he can give to the Church, if he chooses, and leave me disinherited."

"We don't mind that a bit as a starter up in Kansas. Come out on our prairies and try it," I suggested.

"But, Gail, that isn't all. There is something worse, dreadfully worse, that I cannot tell you, that only the Rameros know, and hold like a sword over my head. If I marry Marcos his father will destroy all evidence of it and I shall have a handsome, talented, rich husband." Eloise bowed her head and clasped her hands, crushed by the misery of her lot.

"And if you refuse to marry this scoundrel?" I asked, bluntly.

"Then I will be a penniless outcast. The Rameros are powerful here, and the Church will be with them, for it will get my inheritance. I am helpless and alone and I don't know what to do."

I think I had never known what anger meant before. This beautiful girl, homeless, and about to be robbed of her fortune, reared in luxury, with no chance for developing self-reliance and courage, was being hemmed in and forced to a marriage by threats of poverty and a secret something against which she was powerless. All the manhood in me rallied to her cause, and she was an hundredfold dearer to me now, in her helplessness.

"Eloise, I'm a horny-handed driver of a bull-team on the Santa Fé Trail, but you will let me help you if I can. So far as your money is concerned, there's a lot of it on earth, even if the Church should grab up your little bit because Ferdinand Ramero says your father's will permits it. There are evil representatives in every Church, no matter what its name may be, Catholic, Protestant, Indian, or Jew, but Father Josef up there is bigger than his priestly coat, and you can trust that size anywhere. And as to the knowledge of this 'something' known just to Ferdinand Ramero, if he is the only one who knows it, it is too small to get far, if it were turned loose. And any man who would use such infamous means to get what he wants is too small to have much influence if he doesn't get it. This is a big, wide, good world, Little Lees, and the father of Marcos Ramero, with all his power and wealth, has a short lariat that doesn't let him graze wide. Jondo holds the other end of that lariat, and he knows."

Eloise listened eagerly, but her face was very white.

"Gail, you don't know the Ramero blood. I am helpless and terrified with them in spite of their suave manners and flattering words. Why did Father Josef bring me back here if the Church is not with them? And then that awful shadow of some hidden thing that may darken my life. I know their cruel, pitiless hearts. They stop at nothing when they want their way. I have known them to do the most cold-blooded deeds."

Poor Eloise! The net about her had been skilfully drawn.

"I don't know Father Josef's motive, but I can trust him. And no shadow shall trouble you long, Little Lees. Jondo and Uncle Esmond `tote together,' Aunty Boone said long ago. They know something about the Ramero blood, and Jondo has promised to tell me his story some day. He must do it to-night, and to-morrow we'll see the end of this tangle. Trust me, Eloise," I said, comfortingly.

"But, Gail, I'm afraid Ferdinand will kill you if you get in his way." Eloise clung to my arm imploringly.

"Six big Kiowas got fooled at that job. Do you think this thin streak of humanity would try it?" I asked, lightly.

Eloise stood up beside me.

"I must go away now," she said.

"Then I'll go with you. Thank you, Father Josef, for your kindness," I said as the priest came toward us.

"You are welcome, my son. In the sanctuary circle no harm can come. Peace be with both of you."

There was a world of benediction in his deep tones, and his smile was genial, as he followed us to the street and stood as if watching for some one.

"I will meet you at San Miguel's to-morrow afternoon, Gail," Eloise said, as we reached a low but pretentious adobe dwelling. "This is my home now."

"Your new Mexican homes are thick-walled, and you live all on the inside," I said, as we paused at the doorway. "They make me think of the lower invertebrates, hard-shelled, soft-bodied animals. Up on the Kansas prairies and the Missouri bluffs we have a central vetebra--the family hearth-stone--and we live all around it. That is the people who have them do. There isn't much home life for a freighter of the plains anywhere. Good by, Little Lees." I took her offered hand. "I'm glad you have let me be your friend, a hard-shelled bull-whacker like me."

The street was full of shadows and the evening air was chill as the door closed on that sweet face and cloud of golden hair. But the pressure of warm white fingers lingered long in my sense of touch as I retraced my steps to the trail's end. At the church door I saw Father Josef still waiting, as if watching for somebody.

All that Eloise had told me ran through my mind, but I felt sure that neither financial nor churchly influence in Santa Fé could be turned to evil purposes so long as men like Felix Narveo and Father Josef were there. And then I thought of Esmond Clarenden, himself neither Mexican nor Roman Catholic, who, nevertheless, drew to himself such fair-dealing, high-minded men as these, always finding the best to aid him, and combating the worst with daring fearlessness. Surely with the priest and the merchant and Jondo as my uncle's representative, no harm could come to the girl whom I knew that I should always love.

And with my mind full of Eloise and her need I sought out Jondo and listened to his story.

---

XIV

OPENING THE RECORD

Fighting for leave to live and labor well,
God flung me peace and ease.
--"A SONG OF THE ENGLISH."

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

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

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

"Oh, you young bucks are all alike. You know just enough to be good to yourselves. You don't think much about anybody else," Jondo said, with a smile.

"I think of others, Jondo, and for that reason I want you to tell me that story about Ferdinand Ramero that you promised to tell me one night back on the trail."

Jondo gave a start.

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

"But it is to help somebody else, not just to be good to myself, that I want to know it," I insisted, using his own terms. And then I told him what Eloise had told me in the San Miguel church.

"Are the Ramero's so powerful here that they can control the Church in their scheme to get what they want?" I asked.

"It would be foolish to underestimate the strength of Ferdinand Ramero," Jondo replied, adding, grimly, "It has been my lot to know the best of men who could make me believe all men are good, and the worst of men who make me doubt all humanity." He clenched his fists as if to hold himself in check, and something, neither sigh nor groan nor oath nor prayer, but like them all, burst from his lips.

"If you ever have a real cross, Gail, thank the Lord for the green prairies and the open plains, and the danger-stimulus of the old Santa Fé Trail. They will seal up your wounds, and soften your hard, rebellious heart, and make you see things big, and despise the narrow little crooks in your path."

One must have known Jondo, with his bluff manner and sunny smile and daring spirit, to feel the force, of these brave sad words. I felt intuitively that I had laid bare a wound of his by my story.

"It is for Eloise, not for my curiosity, that I have come to you," I said, gently. "And you didn't come too soon, boy." Jondo was himself in a moment. "It is another cruel act in the old tragedy of Ramero against Clarenden and others."

"Will the Church be bribed by the St. Vrain estate and urge this wedding?" I asked.

"The Church considers money as so much power for the Kingdom. I have heard that the St. Vrain estate was left in Ramero's hands with the proviso that if Eloise should marry foolishly before she was twenty-five she, would lose her property. Do you see the trick in the game, and why Ramero can say that if he chooses he can take her heritage away from her? But as he keeps everything in his own hands it is hard to know the truth about anything connected with money matters."

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

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

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

"Because I knew Father Josef before he became a priest, and why he took the vows," Jondo declared. "Unless a man brings some manhood to the altar, he will not find it in the title nor the dress there, it makes no difference whether he be Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew, or heathen. Father Josef was a gentleman before he was a priest."

"Well, if he's all right, why did he bring Eloise back here into the heart of all this trouble?" I questioned.

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

"I don't know his motive, unless he felt he could protect her here himself; but I tell you, my boy, he can be trusted. Let me tell you something, Gail. When Esmond Clarenden and I were boys back in a New England college we knew two fellows from the Southwest whose fathers were in official circles at Washington. One was Felix Narveo, thoroughbred Mexican, thoroughbred gentleman, a bit lacking in initiative sometimes, for he came from the warmer, lazier lands, but as true as the compass in his character. The other fellow was Dick Verra, French father, English mother; I think he had a strain of Indian blood farther back somewhere, but he would have been a prince in any tribe or nation. A happy, wholesome, red-blooded, young fellow, with the world before him for his conquest.

"We knew another fellow, too, Fred Ramer, self-willed, imperious, extravagant in his habits, greedy and unscrupulous; but he was handsome and masterful, with a compelling magnetism that made us admire him and bound us to him. He had never known what it meant to have a single wish denied him. And with his make-up, he would stop at nothing to have his own way, until his wilful pride and stubbornness and love of luxury ruined him. But in our college days we were his satellites. He was always in debt to all of us, for money was his only god and we never dared to press him for payment. The only one of us who ever overruled him was Dick Verra. But Dick was a born master of men. There was one other chum of ours, but I'll tell you about him later. Boys together, we had many escapades and some serious problems, until by the time our college days were over we were bound together by those ties that are made in jest and broken with choking voices and eyes full of tears."

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

"Things happened to that little group of college men as time went on. You know your uncle's life, leading merchant of Kansas City and the Southwest; and mine, plainsman and freighter on the Santa Fé Trail. Felix Narveo's history is easily read. Esmond Clarenden came down here at the outbreak of the Mexican War, and together he and Narveo laid the foundation for the present trail commerce that is making the country at either end of it rich and strong. Dick Verra is now Father Josef." Jondo paused as if to gather force for the rest of the story. Then he said:

"Back at college we all knew Mary Marchland, a beautiful Louisiana girl who visited in Washington and New England, and all of us were in love with her. When our life-lines crossed again Clarenden had come to St. Louis. About that time his two older brothers and their wives died suddenly of yellow fever, leaving you and Beverly alone. It was Felix Narveo who brought you up to St. Louis to your uncle."

"I remember that. The steamboat, and the Spanish language, and Felix Narveo's face. I recalled that when I saw him years ago," I exclaimed.

"You always were all eyes and ears, remembering names and faces, where Beverly would not recall anything," Jondo declared.

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

"He is Ferdinand Ramero here. He married Narveo's sister later. She is not the mother of Marcos, but a second wife. She owned a tract of land inherited from the Narveo estate down in the San Christobal country. There is a lonely ranch house in a picturesque cañon, and many acres of grazing-land. She keeps it still as hers, although her stepson, Marcos, claims it now. It is for her sake that Narveo doesn't dare to move openly against Ramero. And in his masterful way he has enough influence with a certain ring of Mexicans here, some of whom are Narveo's freighters, to reach pretty far into the Indian country. That's why I knew those Mexicans were lying to us about the Kiowas at Pawnee Rock. I could see Ramero's gold pieces in their hands. He joined the Catholic Church, and plays the Pharisee generally. But the traits of his young manhood, intensified, are still his. He is handsome, and attractive, and rich, and influential, but he is also cold-blooded, and greedy for money until it is his ruling passion, villainously unscrupulous, and mercilessly unforgiving toward any one who opposes his will; and his capacity for undying hatred is appalling."

And this was the man who was seeking to control the life of Eloise St. Vrain. I fairly groaned in my anger.

"The failure to win Mary Marchland's love was the first time in his life that Fred Ramer's will had ever been thwarted, and he went mad with jealousy and anger. Gail, they are worse masters than whisky and opium, once they get a man down."

Jondo paused, and when he spoke again he did it hurriedly, as one who, from a sense of duty, would glance at the dead face of an enemy and turn away.

"When Fred lost his suit with Mary, he determined to wreck her life. He came between her and the man she loved with such adroit cruelty that they were separated, and although they loved each other always, they never saw each other again. Through a terrible network of misunderstandings she married Theron St. Vrain. He, by the way, was the other college chum I spoke of just now. He and his foster-brother, Bertrand, were wards of Fred Ramer's father. But their guardian, the elder Ramer, had embezzled most of their property and there was bitter enmity between them and him. Theron and Mary were the parents of Eloise St. Vrain. It is no wonder that she is beautiful. She had Mary Marchland for a mother. Theron St. Vrain died early, and the management of his property fell into Fred Ramer's hands. At Mary's death it would descend to Eloise, with the proviso I just mentioned of an unworthy marriage. In that case, Ramer, at his own discretion, could give the estate to the Church. Nobody knows when Mary Marchland died, nor where she is buried, except Fred and his confessor, Father Josef."

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

"Oh, not so far as a man's love. Listen, Gail." Never a man had a truer eye and a sweeter smile than my big Jondo.

"Fred Ramer was desperately in need of money when he was plotting to darken the life of Mary Marchland--that was just before the birth of Eloise--and through her sorrow to break the heart of the man whom she loved--I said we college boys were all in love with her, you remember. Let me make it short now. One night Fred's father was murdered, by whom was never exactly proven. But he was last seen alive with his ward, Theron St. Wain, who, with his foster-brother, Bertrand, thoroughly despised him for his plain robbery of their heritage.

"The case was strong against Theron, for the evidence was very damaging, and it would have gone hard with him but for the foster-brother. Bertrand St. Wain took the guilt upon himself by disappearing suddenly. He was supposed to have drowned himself in the lower Mississippi, for his body, recognized only by some clothing, was recovered later in a drift and decently buried. So he was effaced from the records of man."

In the dim light Jondo's blue eyes were like dull steel and his face was a face of stone, but he continued:

"Just here Clarenden comes into the story. He learned it through Felix Narveo, and Felix got it from the Mexicans themselves, that Fred Ramer had plotted with them to put his father out of the way--I said he was desperately in need of money--and to lay the crime on Theron St. Vrain, by whose disgrace the life of Mary Marchland would be blighted, and Fred would have his revenge and his father's money. Narveo was afraid to act against Ramer, but nothing ever scared Esmond Clarenden away from what he wanted to do. Through his friendship for St. Vrain, to whom some suspicion still clung, and that lost foster-brother, Bertrand, he turned the screws on Fred Ramer that drove him out of the country. He landed, finally, at Santa Fé, and became Ferdinand Ramero. He managed by his charming manners to enchant the sister of Felix Narveo--and you know the rest."

Jondo paused.

"Didn't Felix Narveo go to Fort Leavenworth once, just before Uncle Esmond brought us with him to Santa Fé?" I asked.

"Yes, he went to warn Clarenden not to leave you there unprotected, for a band of Ramero's henchmen were on their way then to the Missouri River--we passed them at Council Grove--to kidnap you three and take you to old Mexico," Jondo said. "An example of Fred's efforts to get even with Clarenden and of the loyalty of Narveo to his old college chum. The same gang of Mexicans had kidnapped Little Blue Flower and given her to the Kiowas."

"You told me that Uncle Esmond forced Ferdinand Ramero out of the country on account of a wrong done to you, Jondo," I reminded the big plainsman.

"He did," Jondo replied. "I told you that we all loved Mary Marchland. Fred Ramer broke under his loss of her, and became the devil's own tool of hate and revenge, and what generally gets tied up with these sooner or later, a passion for money and irregular means of getting it. Money is as great an asset for hate as for love, and Fred sold his soul for it long ago. Clarenden came to the frontier and lost himself in the building of the plains commerce, and his heart he gave to the three orphan children to whom he gave a home. When New Mexico came under our flag Narveo came with it, a good citizen and a loyal patriot. He married a Mexican woman of culture and lives a contented life. Dick Verra went into the Church. I came to the plains, and the stimulus of danger, and the benediction of the open sky, and the healing touch of the prairie winds, and the solemn stillness of the great distances have made me something more of a man than I should have been. Maybe I was hurt the worst. Clarenden thought I was. Sometimes I think Dick Verra got the best of all of us."

Jondo's voice trailed off into silence and I knew what his hurt was--that he was the man whom Mary Marchland had loved, from whom Fred Ramer, by his cruel machinations, had separated her--" and although they loved each other always, they never saw each other again ." Poor Jondo! What a man among men this unknown freighter of the plains might have been--and what a loss to the plains in the best of the trail years if Jondo had never dared its dangers for the safety of the generations to come.

But the thought of Eloise, driven out momentarily by Jondo's story, came rushing in again.

"You said you put a ring around Ramero to keep him in Santa Fé. Can't we get Eloise outside of it?" I urged, anxiously.

"Maybe I should have said that Father Josef put it around him for me," Jondo replied. "He confessed his crimes fully to the Church. He couldn't get by Father Josef. Here he is much honored and secure and we let him alone. The disgrace he holds the secret of--he alone--is that the father of Eloise killed his father, the crime for which the foster-brother fell. Ramero as guardian of Eloise and her property legally could have kept her here. Only a man like Clarenden would have dared to take her away, though he had the pleading call of her mother's last wish. Gail, I have told you the heart-history of half a dozen men. If this had stopped with us we could forgive after a while, but it runs down to you and Beverly and Eloise and Marcos, who will carry out his father's plans to the letter. So the battle is all to be fought over again. Let me leave you a minute or two. I'll not be gone long."

I sat alone, staring out at the shadowy court and, above it, the blue night-sky of New Mexico inlaid with stars, until a rush of feet in the hall and a shout of inquiry told me that Beverly Clarenden was hunting for me.

Meantime the girl in Mexican dress, who had come out of the church with Father Josef when he came to greet Eloise and me, had passed unnoticed through the Plaza and out on the way leading to the northeast. Here she came to the blind adobe wall of La Garita, whose olden purpose one still may read in the many bullet-holes in its brown sides. Here she paused, and as the evening shadows lengthened the dress and wall blended their dull tones together.

Beverly Clarenden, who had gone with Rex Krane up to Fort Marcy that evening, had left his companion to watch the sunset and dream of Mat back on the Missouri bluff, while he wandered down La Garita. He did not see the Mexican woman standing motionless, a dark splotch against a dun wall, until a soft Hopi voice called, eagerly, "Beverly, Beverly."

The black scarf fell from the bright face, and Indian garb--not Po-a-be, the student of St. Ann's and the guest of the Clarenden home, with the white Grecian robe and silver headband set with coral pendants, as Beverly had seen her last in the side porch on the night of Mat's wedding, but Little Blue Flower, the Indian of the desert lands, stood before him.

"Where the devil--I mean the holy saints and angels, did you come from?" Beverly cried, in delight, at seeing a familiar face.

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

She reached out her hand with a letter. Beverly took the letter and the hand. He put the message in his pocket, but he did not release the hand.

"That's something for Jondo. I'll see that he gets it, all right. Tell me all about yourself now, Little Run-Off-and-Never-Come-Back." It was Beverly's way to make people love him, because he loved people.

It was late at last, too late for prudence, older heads would agree, when these two separated, and my cousin came to pounce upon me in the hotel court to tell me of his adventure.

"And I learned a lot of things," he added. "That Indian in the Plaza to-day is Santan, or Satan, dead sure; and you'd never guess, but he's the same redskin--Apache red--that was out at Agua Fria that time we were there long ago. The very same little sneak! He followed us clear to Bent's Fort. He put up a good story to Jondo, but I'll bet he was somebody's tool. You know what a critter he was there. But listen now! He's got his eye on Little Blue Flower. He's plain wild Injun, and she's a Saint Ann's scholar. Isn't that presumption, though! She's afraid of him, too. This country fairly teams with romance, doesn't it?"

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

"Well, I guess I do. I found that Santan, dead loaded with jealousy, sneaking after us in the dark to-night when I took Little Blue Flower for a stroll. I took him seriously, and told him exactly where he'd find me next time he was looking for me. That I'd stand him up against La Garita and make a sieve out of him," Beverly said, carelessly.

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

"I may be, but I'm no coward," Beverly retorted. "Oh, here comes Jondo. I've got a letter from Father Josef. Invitation to some churchly dinner, I expect."

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

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

"When did you get this? I should have had it two hours ago," Jondo said, sternly. "Father Josef must have waited a long time up at the church door for his messenger to come back and bring him word from me."

Beverly frankly told him the truth, as from childhood we had learned was the easiest way out of trouble.

Jondo's smile came back to his eyes, but his lips did not smile as he said: "Gail, you can explain things to Bev. This is serious business, but it had to come sooner or later. The battle is on, and we'll fight it out. Ferdinand Ramero is determined that Eloise and his son shall be married early to-morrow morning. The bribe to the Church is one-half of the St. Vrain estate. The club over Eloise is the shame of some disgrace that he holds the key to. He will stop at nothing to have his own way, and he will stoop to any brutal means to secure it. He has a host of fellows ready at his call to do any crime for his sake. That's how far money and an ungovernable passion can lead a man. If I had known this sooner, we would have acted to-night."

Beverly groaned.

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

"He'd do that for you through a Mexican dagger, or an Apache arrow, if you got in his way," Jondo replied. "But what we must do is this: Twenty miles south on the San Christobal Arroyo there is a lonely ranch-house on the old Narveo estate, a forgotten place, but it is a veritable fort, built a hundred years ago, when every house here was a fort. To-morrow at daybreak you must start with Eloise and Sister Anita down there. I will see Father Josef later and tell him where I have sent you. Little Blue Flower will show you the way. It is a dangerous ride, and you must make it as quickly and as silently as possible. A bullet from some little cañon could find you easily if Ramero should know your trail. Will you go?"

There was no need for the question as Jondo well knew, but his face was bright with courage and hope, and a thankfulness he could not express shone in his eyes as he looked at us, big, stalwart, eager and unafraid.

---

XV

THE SANCTUARY ROCKS OF SAN CHRISTOBAL

Mark where she stands! Around her form I draw
The awful circle of our solemn church!
Set but a foot within that holy ground,
And on thy head--yea, though it wore a crown--
launch the curse of Rome.
--"RICHELIEU."

The faint rose hue of early dawn was touching the highest peaks of the Sandia and Jemez mountain ranges, while the valley of the Rio Grande still lay asleep under dull night shadows, when five ponies and their riders left the door of San Miguel church and rode southward in the slowly paling gloom. In the stillness of the hour the ponies' feet, muffled in the sand of the way, seemed to clatter noisily, and their trappings creaked loudly in the dead silence of the place. Little Blue Flower, no longer in her Mexican dress, led the line. Behind her Beverly and the white-faced nun of St. Ann's rode side by side; and behind these came Eloise St. Vrain and myself. From the church door Jondo had watched us until we melted into the misty shadows of the trail.

"Go carefully and fearlessly and ride hard if you must. But the struggle will be here with me to-day, not where you are," he assured us, when we started away.

As he turned to leave the church, an Indian rose from the shadows beyond it and stepped before him.

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

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

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

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

"I would bring another message from him. He would see you an hour later than you planned. The young riders, where shall I tell him they have gone?"

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

The Indian smiled, and turning quickly, he disappeared up the dark street. A sudden thrill shook Jondo.

"Father Josef said I could trust that boy entirely. Surely old Dick Verra, part Indian himself, couldn't be mistaken. But that Apache lied to me. I know it now; and I told him where our boys are taking Eloise. I never made a blunder like that before. Damned fool that I am!"

He ground his teeth in anger and disgust, as he sat down in the doorway of the church to await the coming of Ferdinand Ramero and his son, Marcos.

Out on the trail our ponies beat off the miles with steady gait. As the way narrowed, we struck into single file, moving silently forward under the guidance of Little Blue Flower, now plunging into dark cañons, where the trail was rocky and perilous, now climbing the steep sidling paths above the open plain. Morning came swiftly over the Gloriettas. Darkness turned to gray; shapeless masses took on distinctness; the night chill softened to the crisp breeze of dawn. Then came the rare June day in whose bright opening hour the crystal skies of New Mexico hung above us, and about us lay a landscape with radiant lights on the rich green of the mesa slopes, and gray levels atint with mother-of-pearl and gold.

The Indian pueblos were astir. Mexican faces showed now and then at the doorways of far-scattered groups of adobe huts. Outside of these all was silence--a motionless land full of wild, rugged beauty, and thrilling with the spell of mystery and glamour of romance. And overbrooding all, the spirit of the past, that made each winding trail a footpath of the centuries; each sheer cliff a watch-tower of the ages; each wide sandy plain, a rallying-ground for the tribes long ago gone to dust; each narrow valley a battle-field for the death-struggle between the dusky sovereigns of a wilderness kingdom and the pale-faced conquerors of the coat of mail and the dominant soul. The sense of danger lessened with distance and no knight of old Spain ever rode more proudly in the days of chivalry than Beverly Clarenden and I rode that morning, fearing nothing, sure of our power to protect the golden-haired girl, thrilled by this strange flight through a land of strange scenes fraught with the charm of daring and danger. Beverly rode forward now with Little Blue Flower. I did not wonder at her spell over him, for she was in her own land now, and she matched its picturesque phases with her own picturesque racial charm.

I rode beside Eloise, forgetting, in the sweet air and glorious June sunlight, that we were following an uncertain trail away from certain trouble.

The white-faced nun in her somber dress, rode between, with serious countenance and downcast eyes.

"What happened to you, Little Lees, after I left you?" I asked, as we trotted forward toward the San Christobal valley.

"Everything, Gail," she replied, looking up at me with shy, sad eyes. "First Ferdinand Ramero came to me with the command that I should consent to be married this morning. By this time I would have been Marcos' wife." She shivered as she spoke. "I can't tell you the way of it, it was so final, so cruel, so impossible to oppose. Ferdinand's eyes cut like steel when they look at you, and you know he will do more than he threatens. He said the Church demanded one-half of my little fortune and that he could give it the other half if he chose. He is as imperious as a tyrant in his pleasanter moods; in his anger he is a maniac. I believe he would murder Marcos if the boy got in his way, and his threats of disgracing me were terrible."

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

"I have not seen anybody else except Little Blue Flower. She has an Indian admirer who is Ferdinand's tool and spy. He let her come in to see me late last night or I should not have been here now. I had almost given up when she brought me word that you and Beverly would meet me at the church at daylight. I have not slept since. What will be the end of this day's work? Isn't there safety for me somewhere?" The sight of the fair, sad face with the hunted look in the dark eyes cut me to the soul.

"Jondo said last night that the battle was on and he would fight it out in Santa Fé to-day. It is our work to go where the Hopi blossom leads us, and Bev Clarenden and I will not let anything happen to you."

I meant what I said, and my heart is always young when I recall that morning ride toward the San Christobal Arroyo and my abounding vigor and confidence in my courage and my powers.

Our trail ran into a narrow plain now where a yellow band marked the way of the San Christobal River toward the Rio Grande. On either hand tall cliffs, huge weather-worn points of rock, and steep slopes, spotted with evergreen shrubs, bordered the river's course. The silent bigness of every feature of the landscape and the beauty of the June day in the June time of our lives, and our sense of security in having escaped the shadows and strife in Santa Fé, all combined to make us free-spirited. Only Sister Anita rode, alert and sorrowful-faced, between Beverly and the gaily-robed Indian girl, and myself with Eloise, the beautiful.

As we rounded a bend in the narrow valley, Little Blue Flower halted us, and pointing to an old half-ruined rock structure beside the stream, she said:

"See, yonder is the chapel where Father Josef comes sometimes to pray for the souls of the Hopi people. The house we go to find is farther up a cañon over there."

"I remember the place," Eloise declared. "Father Josef brought me here once and left me awhile. I wasn't afraid, although I was alone, for he told me I was always safe in a church. But I was never allowed to come back again."

Sister Anita crossed herself and, glancing over her shoulder, gave a sharp cry of alarm. We turned about to see a group, of horsemen dashing madly up the trail behind us. The wind in their faces blew back the great cloud of dust made by their horses hoofs, hiding their number and the way behind them. Their steeds were wet with foam, but their riders spurred them on with merciless fury. In the forefront Ferdinand Ramero's tall form, towering above the small statured evil-faced Mexican band he was leading, was outlined against the dust-cloud following them, and I caught the glint of light on his drawn revolver. "Ride! Ride like the devil!" Beverly shouted.

At the same time he and the Hopi girl whirled out and, letting us pass, fell in as a rear guard between us and our pursuers. And the race was on.

Jondo had said the lonely ranch-house whither we were tending was as strong as a fort. Surely it could not be far away, and our ponies were not spent with hard riding. Before us the valley narrowed slightly, and on its rim jagged rock cliffs rose through three hundred feet of earthquake-burst, volcanic-tossed confusion to the high tableland beyond.

As we strained forward, half a dozen Mexican horsemen suddenly appeared on the trail before us to cut off our advance. Down between us and the new enemy stood the old stone chapel, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, where for two hundred long years it had set up an altar to the Most High on this lonely savage plain.

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

Her long veil was streaming back in the wind, and her rosary and crucifix beating about her shoulders with the hard riding, but her white face was brave with a divine trust. Yet even as she urged us I saw how imposible was her plea, for the men in front were already nearer to the place than we were. At the same time a pony dashed up beside me, and Little Blue Flower's voice rang in my ears.

"The rocks! Climb up and hide in the rocks!" She dropped back on one side of Beverly, with Sister Anita on the other, guarding our rear. As I turned our flight toward the cliff, I caught sight of an Indian in a wedge of rock just across the river, and I heard the singing flight of an arrow behind me, followed almost instantly by another arrow. I looked back to see Sister Anita's pony staggering and rearing in agony, with Little Blue Flower trying vainly to catch its bridle-rein, and Sister Anita, clutching wildly at her rosary, a great stream of blood flowing from an arrow wound in her neck.

Men think swiftly in moments like these. The impulse to halt, and the duty to press on for the protection of the girl beside me, holding me in doubt. Instantly I saw the dark crew, with Ferdinand Ramero leading fiercely forward, almost upon us, and I heard Beverly Clarenden's voice filling the valley--"Run, Gail, run! You can beat 'em up there."

It was a cry of insistences and assurances and power, and withal there was that minor tone of sympathy which had sounded in the boy's defiant voice long ago in the gray-black shadows below Pawnee Rock, when his chivalric soul had been stirred by the cruel wrongs of Little Blue Flower and he had cried:

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

I knew in a flash that the three behind us were cut off, and Eloise St. Vrain and I pressed on alone. We crossed the narrow strip of rising ground to where the first rocks lay as they had fallen from the cliff above, split off by some titanic agony of nature. Up and up we went, our ponies stumbling now and then, but almost as surefooted as men, as they climbed the narrow way. Now the rocks hid us from the plain as we crept sturdily through narrow crevices, and now we clambered up an open path where nothing concealed our way. But higher still and higher, foot, by foot we pressed, while with oath and growl behind us came our pursuers.

At last we could ride no farther, and the miracle was that our ponies could have climbed so far. Above us huge slabs of stone, by some internal cataclysm hurled into fragments of unguessed tons of weight, seemed poised in air, about to topple down upon the plain below. Between these wild, irregular masses a narrow footing zigzagged upward to still other wild, irregular masses, a footing of long leaps in cramped spaces between sharp edges of upright clefts, all gigantic, unbending, now shielding by their immense angles, now standing sheer and stark before us, casting no shadows to cover us from the great white glare of the New-Mexican day.

I have said no man knows where his mind will run in moments of peril. As we left our ponies and clambered up and up in hope of safety somewhere, the face of the rocks cut and carved by the rude stone tools of a race long perished, seemed to hold groups of living things staring at us and pointing the way. And there was no end to these crude pictographs. Over and over and over--the human hand, the track of the little road-runner bird, the plumed serpent coiled or in waving line, the human form with the square body and round head, with staring circles for eyes and mouth, and straight-line limbs.

We were fleeing for safety through the sacred aisles of a people God had made; and when they served His purpose no longer, they had perished. I did not think of them so that morning. I thought only of some hiding-place, some inaccessible point where nothing could reach the girl I must protect. But these crawling serpents, cut in the rock surfaces, crawled on and on. These human hands, poor detached hands, were lifted up in mute token of what had gone before. These two-eyed, one-mouthed circles on heads fast to body-boxes, from which waved tentacle limbs, jigged by us, to give place to other coiled or crawling serpents and their companion carvings, with the track of the swift road-runner skipping by us everywhere.

At last, with bleeding hands and torn clothing, we stood on a level rock like a tiny mesa set out from the high summit of the cliff.

Eloise sat down at my feet as I looked back eagerly over the precipitous way we had come, and watched the band of Mexicans less rapidly swarming up the same steep, devious trail.

Three hundred feet below us lay the plain with the thin current of the San Christobal River sparkling here and there in the sunlight. The black spot on the trail that scarcely moved must be Beverly and Little Blue Flower with Sister Anita. No, there was only the Indian girl there, and something moving in and out of the shadow near them. I could not see for the intervening rocks.

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

And I was one against a dozen. I stooped to where she sat and gently lifted her limp white hand, saying:

"Eloise, I was on a rock like this a night and a day alone on the prairie. I could not move nor cry out. But something inside told me to 'hold fast'--the old law of the trail. You must do that with me now."

A shout broke over the valley and the rocks about us seemed suddenly to grow men, as if every pictograph of the old stone age had become a sentient thing, a being with a Mexican dress, and the soul of a devil. Just across a narrow chasm, a little below us, Ferdinand Ramero stood in all the insolence of a conqueror, with a smile that showed his white teeth, and in his steely eyes was the glitter of a snake about to spring.

"You have given us a hard race. By Jove, you rode magnificently and climbed heroically. I admire you for it. It is fine to bring down game like you, Clarenden. You have your uncle's spirit, and a six-foot body that dwarfs his short stature. And we come as gentlemen only, if we can deal with a gentleman. It wasn't our men who struck your nun down there. But if you, young man, dare to show one ounce of fighting spirit now, behind you on the rocks--don't look--as I lift my hand are my good friends who will put a bullet into the brain beneath that golden hair, and you will follow. Being a game-cock cannot help you now. It will only hasten things. Deliver that girl to me at once, or my men will close in upon you and no power on earth can save you."

Eloise had sprung to her feet and stood beside me, and both of us knew the helplessness of our plight. A startling picture it must have been, and one the cliffs above the San Christobal will hardly see again: the blue June sky arched overhead, unscarred by a single cloud-fleck, the yellow plain winding between the high picturesque cliffs, where silence broods all through the long hours of the sunny day; the pictured rocks with their furnace-blackened faces white--outlined with the story of the dim beginnings of human strivings. And standing alone and defenseless on the little table of stone, as if for sacrifice, the tall, stalwart young plainsman and the beautiful girl with her golden hair in waving masses about her uncovered head, her sweet face white as the face of the dying nun beside the sandy arroyo below us, her big dark eyes full of a strange fire.

"I order you to close in and take these two at once." The imperious command rang out, and the rocks across the valley must have echoed its haughty tone.

"And I order you to halt."

The voice of Father Josef, clear and rich and powerful, burst upon the silence like cathedral music on the still midnight air. The priest's tall form rose up on a great mass of rock across the cleft before us--Father Josef with bared head and flashing eyes and a physique of power.

Ferdinand Ramero turned like a lion at bay. "You are one man. My force number a full dozen. Move on," he ordered.

Again the voice of Father Josef ruled the listening ears.

"Since the days of old the Church has had the power to guard all that come within the shelter of the holy sanctuary. And to the Church of God was given also long ago the might to protect, by sanctuary privilege, the needy and the defenseless. Ferdinand Ramero, note that little table of rock where those two stand helpless in your grasp. Around them now I throw, as I have power to throw, the sacred circle of our Holy Church in sanctuary shelter. Who dares to step inside it will be accursed in the sight of God."

Never, never will I live through another moment like to that, nor see the power of the Unseen rule things that are seen with such unbreakable strength.

The Mexicans dropped to their knees in humble prayer, and Ferdinand Ramero seemed turned to a man of stone. A hand was gently laid upon my arm and Jondo and Rex Krane stood beside us. A voice far off was sounding in my ears.

"Go back to your homes and meet me at the church to-morrow night. You, Ferdinand Ramero, go now to the chapel yonder and wait until I come."

What happened next is lost in misty waves of forgetfulness.

---

XVI

FINISHING TOUCHES

" Yet there be certain times in a young man's life when through great sorrow or sin all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood. "
--KIPLING.

The heat of midday was tempered by a light breeze up the San Christobal Valley, and there was not a single cloud in the June skies to throw a softening shadow on the yellow plain. A little group of Mexicans, riding northward with sullen faces, urged on their jaded ponies viciously as they thought of the gold that was to have been paid them for this morning's work, and of the gold that to-morrow night must go to pay the priest who should shrive them; and they had nothing gained wherewith to pay. Their leader, whom they had served, had been trapped in his own game, and they felt themselves abused and deceived.

Down by the brown sands of the river Father Josef waited at the door of the half-ruined little stone chapel for the strange group coming slowly toward him: Ferdinand Ramero, riding like a captured but unconquered king, his head erect, his flashing eyes seeing nobody; Jondo who could make the shabbiest piece of horseflesh take on grace when he mounted it, his tanned cheek flushed, and the spirit of supreme sacrifice looking out through his dark-blue eyes; Eloise, drooping like a white flower, but brave of spirit now, sure that her grief and anxiety would be lifted somehow. I rode beside her, glad to catch the faint smile in her eyes when she looked at me. And last of all, Rex Krane, with the same old Yankee spirit, quick to help a fellow-man and oblivious to personal danger. So we all came to the chapel, but at the door Rex wheeled and rode away, muttering, as he passed me:

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

And Beverly! He was not with us.

When Rex Krane told his bride good-by up in the Clarenden home on the Missouri bluff, Mat had whispered one last request:

"Look after Bev. He never sees danger for himself, nor takes anything seriously, least of all an enemy, whom he will befriend, and make a joke of it."

And so it happened that Rex had stayed behind to care for Beverly's arrow wound when Bill Banney had gone out with Jondo on the Kiowa trail to search for me this side of Pawnee Rock.

So also it happened that Rex had strolled down from Fort Marcy the night before, in time to see Beverly and the girl in the Mexican dress loitering along the brown front of La Garita. And his keen eyes had caught sight of Santan crouching in an angle of the wall, watching them.

"Indians and Mexes don't mix a lot. And Bev oughtn't mix with either one," Rex commented. "I'll line the boy up for review to-morrow, so Mat won't say I've neglected him."

But the Yankee took the precaution to follow the trail to the Indian's possible abiding-place on the outskirts of Santa Fé. And it was Rex who most aided Jondo in finding that the Indian had gone with Ramero's men northward.

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

"Yes, you thought he was Santa and I took him for Satan then. We missed out on which to knock out of him. Bev won't care nothin' about his name. He will knock hell out of him if he gets in that Clarenden boy's way," Rex had replied.

At the chapel door now the Yankee turned away and rode down the trail toward the little angle where an Indian arrow had whizzed at our party an hour before.

In the shadow of a fallen mass of rock below the cliff Little Blue Flower had spread her blanket, with Beverly's coat tucked under it in a roll for a pillow, and now she sat beside the dying nun, holding the crucifix to Sister Anita's lips. The Indian girl's hands were blood-stained and the nun's black veil and gown were disheveled, and her white head-dress and coif were soaked with gore. But her white face was full of peace as the light faded from her eyes.

And Beverly! The boy forgot the rest of the world when one of the Apache's arrows struck down the pony and the other pierced Sister Anita's neck. Tenderly as a mother would lift a babe he quickly carried the stricken woman to the shelter of the rock, and with one glance at her he turned away.

"You can do all that she needs done for her. Give her her cross to hold," he said, gently, to Little Blue Flower.

Then he sprang up and dashed across the river, splashing the bright waters as he leaped to the farther side where Santan stood concealed, waiting for the return of Ramero's Mexicans.

At the sound of Beverly's feet he leaped to the open just in time to meet Beverly's fist square between the eyes.

"Take that, you dirty dog, to shoot down an innocent nun. And that!" Beverly followed his first blow with another.

The Apache, who had reeled back with the weight of the boy's iron fist, was too quick for the second thrust, struggling to get hold of his arrows and his scalping-knife. But the space was too narrow and Beverly was upon him with a shout.

"I told you I'd make a sieve or you the next time you tried to see me, and I'm going to do it."

He seized the Indian's knife and flung it clear into the river, where it stuck upright in the sands of the bed, parting the little stream of water gurgling against it; and with a powerful grip on the Apache's shoulders he wrenched the arrows from their place and tramped on them with his heavy boot.

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

On the one hand, jealousy, the inherited hatred of a mistreated race, the savage instinct, a gloating joy in brute strife, blood-lust, and a dogged will to trample in the dirt the man who made the sun shine black for the Apache. On the other hand, a mad rage, a sense of insult, a righteous greed for vengeance for a cruel deed against an innocent woman, and all the superiority of a dominant people. The one would conquer a powerful enemy, the other would exterminate a despicable and dangerous pest.

Back and forth across the narrow space hidden from the trail by fallen rock they threshed like beasts of prey. The Apache had the swiftness of the snake, his muscles were like steel springs, and there was no rule of honorable warfare in his code. He bit and clawed and pinched and scratched and choked and wrenched, with the grim face and burning eyes of a murderer. But the Saxon youth, slower of motion, heavier of bone and muscle, with a grip like iron and a stony endurance, with pride in a conquest by sheer clean skill, and with a purpose, not to take life, but to humble and avenge, hammered back blow for blow; and there was nothing for many minutes to show which was offensive and which defensive.

As the struggle raged on, the one grew more furious and the other more self-confident.

"Oh, I'll make you eat dust yet!" Beverly cried, as Santan in triumph flung him backward and sprang upon his prostrate form.

They clinched again, and with a mighty surge of strength my cousin lifted himself, and the Indian with him, and in the next fall Beverly had his antagonist gripped and helpless.

"I can choke you out now as easy as you shot that arrow. Say your prayers." He fairly growled out the words.

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

At that moment Beverly, spent, bruised, and bleeding with fighting and surcharged with the lust of combat, felt all the instinct of murder urging him on to utterly destroy a poison-fanged foe to humanity. At Santan's words he paused and, flinging back the hair from his forehead, he caught his breath and his better self in the same heart-beat. And the instinct of the gentleman--he was Esmond Clarenden's brother's son--held the destroying hand.

"You aimed at me! Well, learn your lesson on that right now. Promise never to play the fool that way again. Promise the everlasting God's truth, or here you go."

The boy's clutch tightened on Santan's throat. "By all that's holy, you'll go to your happy hunting-ground right now, unless you do !" He growled out the words, and his blazing eyes glared threateningly at his fallen enemy.

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

"You didn't mean to kill the nun? Then you'll go with me and ask her to forgive you before she dies. You will. You needn't try to get away from me. I let you thrash your strength out before we came to this settlement. Be still!" Beverly commanded, as Santan made a mad effort to release himself.

"Hurry up, and remember she is dying. Go softly and speak gently, or by the God of heaven, you'll go with her to the Judgment Seat to answer for that deed right now!"

Slowly the two rose. Their clothes were torn, their hair disheveled, the ground at their feet was red with their blood. They were as bitter, as distrustful now as when their struggle began. For brute force never conquers anything. It can only hold in check by fear of its power to destroy the body. Above the iron fist of the fighter, and the sword and cannon of the soldier, stands the risen Christ who carried his own cross up Mount Calvary--and "there they crucified him."

The two young men, spent with their struggle, their faces stained with dirt and bloody sweat, crossed the river and sought the shadowy place where Little Blue Flower sat beside Sister Anita. Twice Santan tried to escape, and twice Beverly brought him quickly to his place. It must have been here that I caught sight of them from the rock above.

"One more move like that and the ghost of Sister Anita will walk behind you on every trail you follow as long as your flat feet hit the earth," Beverly declared.

"All Indians are afraid of ghosts and I was just too tired to fight any more," he said to me afterward when he told me the story of that hour by the San Christobal River.

Sister Anita lay with wide-open eyes, her hands moving feebly as she clutched at her crucifix. Her hour was almost spent.

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

"Tell her you did not aim at her, and ask her to forgive you. It will help to save your own soul sometime, maybe."

Santan looked at Little Blue Flower. But she gave no heed to him as she put the dropped crucifix into the weakening fingers. Murder, as such, is as horrifying to the gentle Hopi tribe as it is sport for the cruel Apache.

Beverly loosed his hold now.

"I did not want to hurt you. Forgive me!" Santan said, slowly, as though each word were plucked from him by red-hot pincers.

Sister Anita heard and turned her eyes.

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

The Apache dropped on his knees beside the dying woman and repeated his words. Sister Anita smiled sweetly.

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

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

The Indian rose and passed silently down the trail, leaving Little Blue Flower and Beverly Clarenden together with the dead. At the stream he paused and pulled his knife from the sands beneath the trickling waters, and then went on his way.

But an Indian never forgets.

Rex Krane, who had hurried hither from the chapel, closed the eyes and folded the thin hands of the martyred woman, and sent Beverly forward for help to dispose of the garment of clay that had been Sister Anita. From that day something manly and serious came into Beverly Clarenden's face to stay, but his sense of humor and his fearlessness were unchanged.

That was a solemn hour in the shadow of the rock down in that yellow valley, but beautiful in its forgiving triumph. We who had gathered in the dimly lighted chapel had an hour more solemn for that it was made up of such dramatic minutes as change the trend of life-trails for all the years to come.

The chapel was very old. They tell me that only a broken portion of the circular wall about the altar stands there to-day, a lonely monument to some holy padre's faith and courage and sacrifice in the forgotten years when, in far Hesperia, men dreamed of a Quivera and found only a Calvary.

It may be that I, Gail Clarenden, was also changed as I listened to the deliberations of that day; that something of youth gave place for the stronger manhood that should stay me through the years that came after.

Eloise sat where I could see her face. The pink bloom had come back to it, and the golden hair, disordered by our wild ride and rough climb among the pictured rocks of the cliff, curled carelessly on her white brow and rippled about her shapely head. I used to wonder what setting fitted her beauty best--why wonder that about any beautiful woman?--but the gracious loveliness of this woman was never more appealing to me than in the soft light and sacred atmosphere of the church.

Father Josef's first thought was for her, but he brought water and coarse linen towels, so that, refreshed and clean-faced, we came in to his presence.

"Eloise," his voice was deep and sweet, "so long as you were a child I tried to protect and direct you. Now that you are a woman, you must still be protected, but you must live your own life and choose for yourself. You must meet sorrow and not be crushed by it. You must take up your cross and bear it. It is for this that I have called you back to New Mexico at this time. But remember, my daughter, that life is not given to us for defeat, but for victory; not for tears, but for smiles; not for idle cringing safety, but for brave and joyous struggle."

I thought of Dick Verra, the college man, whose own young years were full of hope and ambition, whose love for a woman had brought him to the priesthood, but as I caught the rich tones of Father Josef's voice, somehow, to me, he stood for success, not failure.

Eloise bowed her head and listened.

"You must no longer be threatened with the loss of your own heritage, nor coerced into a marriage for which the Church has been offered a bribe to help to accomplish. Blood money purifies no altars nor extends the limits of the Kingdom of the Christ. Your property is your own to use for the holy purposes of a goodly life wherever your days may lead you; and whatever the civil law may grant of power to control it for you, you shall no longer be harassed or annoyed. The Church demands that it shall henceforth be yours."

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

"You will now relinquish all claim upon the control of this estate, whose revenue made your father and yourself to be accounted rich, and upon which your son has been allowed to build up a life expectation; and though on account of it, you go forth a poor man in wordly goods, you may go out rich in the blessing of restoration and repentance."

Ferdinand Ramero's steel eyes were fixed like the eyes of a snake on the holy man's face. Restoration and repentance do not belong behind eyes like that.

"I can fight you in the courts. You and your Church may go to the devil;" he seemed to hiss rather than to speak these words.

"We do go to him every day to bring back souls like yours," Father Josef's voice was calm. "I have waited a long time for you to repent. You can go to the courts, but you will not do it. For the sake of your wife, Gloria Ramero, and Felix Narveo, her brother, we do not move against you, and you dare not move for yourself, because your own record will not bear the light of legal investigation."

Ferdinand Ramero sprang up, the blaze of passion, uncontrolled through all his years, bursting forth in the tragedy of the hour. Eloise was right. In his anger he was a maniac.

"You dare to threaten me! You pen me in a corner to stab me to death! You hold disgrace and miserable poverty over my head, and cant of restoration and repentance! Not until here you name each thing that you count against me, and I have met them point by point, will I restore. I never will repent!"

In the vehemence of anger, Ramero was the embodiment of the dramatic force of unrestraint, and withal he was handsome, with a controlling magnetism even in his hour of downfall.

Jondo had said that Father Josef had somewhere back a strain of Indian blood in his veins. It must have been this that gave the fiber of self control to his countenance as he looked with pitying eyes at Jondo and Eloise St. Vrain.

"The hour is struck," he said, sadly. "And you shall hear your record, point by point, because you ask it now. First: you have retained, controlled, misused, and at last embezzled the fortune of Theron St. Vrain, as it was retained, controlled, misused, and embezzled by your father, Henry Ramer, in his lifetime. Any case in civil courts must show how the heritage of Eloise St. Vrain, heir to Theron St. Vrain at the death of her mother--"

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

For the first time to-day the priest's cheek paled, but his voice was unbroken as he continued:

"I would have been kinder for your own sake. You desire otherwise. Yes, only after the death of Mary Marchland St. Vrain could you dictate concerning her daughter's affairs, with most questionable legality even then. Mary Marchland St. Vrain is not dead."

The chapel was as silent as the grave. My heart stood still. Before me was Jondo, big, strong, self-controlled, inured to the tragic deeds of the epic years of the West. No pen of mine will ever make the picture of Jondo's face at these words of Father Josef.

Eloise turned deathly pale, and her dark eyes opened wide, seeing nothing. It was not I who comforted her, but Jondo, who put his strong arm about her, and she leaned against his shoulder. Father and daughter in spirit, stricken to the heart.

"For many years she has lived in that lonely ranch-house on the Narveo grant in the little cañon up the San Christobal Arroyo. When the fever left her with memory darkened forever, you recorded her as dead. But your wife, Gloria Ramero, spared no pains to make her comfortable. She has never known a want, nor lived through one unhappy hour, because she has forgotten."

"A priest, confessor for men's inmost souls, who babbles all he knows! I wonder that this roof does not fall on you and strike you dead before this altar." Ferdinand Ramero's voice rose to a shout.

"It was too strongly built by one who knew men's inmost souls, and what they needed most," Father Josef replied. "You drove me to this by your insistence. I would have shielded you--and these."

He turned to Eloise and Jondo as he spoke.

"One more point, since you hold it ready to spring when I am through. You stand accused of plotting for your father's murder. The evidence still holds, and some men who rode with you to-day to seize this gentle girl and drag her back to a marriage with your son--and save your ill-gotten gold thereby--some of these men who will confess to me and do penance to-morrow night, are the same men who long ago confessed to other crimes--you can guess what they were.

"It pays well to repent before such a holy tattler as yourself." Ramero's blue eyes burned deep as their fire was centered on the priest.

"These are the counts against you," Father Josef said in review, ignoring the last outburst of wrath. "A life of ease and inheritance through money not your own, nor even rightly yours to control. A stricken woman listed with the dead, whose memory might have come again--God knows--if but the loving touch of childish hands had long ago been on her hands. It is years too late for all that now. A brave young ward rescued from your direct control by Esmond Clarenden's force of will and daring to do the right. You know that last pleading cry of Mary Marchland's, for Jondo to protect her child, and how Clarenden, for love of this brave man, came to New Mexico on perilous trails to take the little Eloise from you. And lastly in this matter, the threats to force a marriage unholy in God's sight, because no love could go with it. Your mad chase and villainous intention to use brute force to secure your will out yonder on the rocks above the cliff. You have debauched an Apache boy, making him your tool and spy. You sanctioned the seizing of a Hopi girl whose parents you permitted to be murdered, and their child sold into slavery among foreign tribes. You have stirred up and kept alive a feud of hatred and revenge among the Kiowa people against the life and property of Esmond Clarenden and all who belong to him. And, added to all these, you stand to-day a patricide in spirit, accused of plotting for the murder of your own father. Do not these things call for restoration and repentance?"

Ferdinand Ramero rose to his feet and stood in the aisle near the door. His face hardened, and all the suave polish and cool concentration and dominant magnetism fell away. What remained was the man as shaped by the ruling passions of years, from whose control only divine power could bring deliverance. And when he spoke there was a remorseless cruelty and selfishness in his low, even tones.

"You have called me a plotter for my father's life--based on some lying Mexican's love of blackmail. You do not even try to prove your charge. The man who would have killed him was Theron St. Vrain, and his brother, Bertrand. That Theron was disgraced by the fact you know very well, and the blackness of it drove him to an early grave. So this young lady here, whom I would have shielded from this stain upon her name in the marriage to my son, may know the truth about her father. He was what you, Father Josef, try to prove me to be."

He paused as if to gather venom for his last shaft.

"These two, Theron and Bertrand, were equally guilty, but through tricks of their own, Theron escaped and Bertrand took the whole crime on himself. He disappeared and paid the penalty by his death. His body was recovered from the river and placed in an unmarked grave. Why go back to that now? Because Bertrand St. Vrain's clothes alone on some poor drowned unknown man were buried. Bertrand himself sits here beside his niece, Eloise St. Vrain. John Doe to the world, the man who lives without a name, and dares not sign a business document, a walking dead man. I could even pity him if he were real. But who can pity nothing?"

A look of defiance came into the man's glittering eyes as he took one step nearer to the door and continued:

"Esmond Clarenden drove me out of the United States with threats of implicating me in the death of my father, and I knew his power and brutal daring to do anything he chose to do. It was but his wish to have revenge for this nameless thing--"

The scorn of Ramero's eyes and voice as he looked at Jondo were withering.

"And this thing keeps me here by threats of attacks, even when he knows that by such attacks he will reveal himself. It has been a grim game." Something of a grin showed all of the man's fine teeth. "A grim game, and never played to a finish till now. I leave it to you, Father Josef, to judge who has been the stronger and who comes out of it victor. I make restoration--of what? I leave the St. Vrain money that I have guarded for Eloise, the daughter of the man who killed, or helped to kill, my father. You can control it now, among you: Clarenden, already rich; your Church, notorious in its robbery of the poor by enriching its coffers; or this uncle here, who is dead and buried in an unknown grave. That is all the restoration I can make. Repentance, I do not know what that word means. Keep it for the poor devils you will gather in to-morrow night to be shriven. They need it. I do not."

He turned and strode out of the church and, mounting his horse, rode like a madman up the yellow valley of the San Christobal. In after years I could find no term to so well describe that last act as the words of Beverly Clarenden, who came to the chapel just in time to hear Ferdinand Ramero's closing declaration, and to see his black scowl and scornful air, as, in a royal madness, he defied the power of man and denounced the all-pitying love that is big enough for the most sinful.

"It was Paradise lost," Beverly declared, "and Satan falling clear to hell before the Archangel's flaming sword. Only he went east and the real Satan dropped down to his place. But they will meet up somewhere, Ramero and the real one, and not be able to tell each other apart."

And Jondo. My boyhood idol, brave, gentle, unselfish, able everywhere! Jondo, who had kept my toddling feet from stumbling, who had taught me to ride and swim and shoot, who had made me wise in plains lore, and manly and clean among the rough and vulgar things of the Missouri frontier. Jondo, whose big, cool hand had touched my feverish face, whose deep blue eyes had looked love into my eyes when I lay dying on Pawnee Rock! A man without a name! A murderer who had by a trick escaped the law, and must walk evermore unknown among his fellow-men! Something went out of my life as I looked at him. The boy in me was burned and seared away, and only the man-to-be, was left.

He offered no word of defense from the accusation against him, nor made a plea of innocence, but sat looking straight at Father Josef, who looked at him as if expecting nothing. And as they gazed into each other's eyes, a something strong and beautiful swept the face of each. I could not understand it, and I was young. My lifetime hero had turned to nothingness before my eyes. The world was full of evil. I hated it and all that in it was, my trusting, foolish, short-sighted self most of all.

But Eloise--the heart of woman is past understanding--Eloise turned to the man beside her and, putting both arms around his neck, she pressed one fair cheek against his brown bearded one, and kissed him gently on the forehead. Then turning to Father Josef, no longer the dependent, clinging maiden, but the loving woman, strong and sure of will, she said:

"I must go to my mother. So long as she lives I will never leave her again."

She did not even look at me, nor speak a word of farewell, as if I were the murderer instead of that man, Jondo, whom she had kissed.

I saw her ride away, with Little Blue Flower beside her. I saw the green mesa, the red cliffs above the growing things, the glitter of the San Christobal water on yellow sands, the level plain where the narrow white trail crept far away toward Gloria Narveo's lonely ranch-house, strong as a fort built a hundred years ago, in a little cañon of the valley. I saw a young, graceful figure on horseback, and the glint of sunlight on golden hair. But the rider did not turn her head and I could not get one glance of those beautiful dark eyes. A great mass of rock hid the line of the trail, and the two, Eloise and Little Blue Flower, rounded the angle and rode on out of my sight.

I helped to dig open the curly mesquite and to shovel out the sand. I heard the burial service, and saw a rudely coffined form lowered into an open grave. I saw Rex Krane at the head, and Jondo at the foot, and Beverly's bleeding hands as he scraped the loose earth back and heaped it over that which had been called Sister Anita; I heard Father Josef's voice of music repeating the "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust." And then we turned away and left the spot, as men turn every day to the common affairs of life.

Four days later Little Blue Flower came to me as I, still numb and cold and blankly unthinking, sat beside Fort Marcy and looked out with unseeing eyes at the glory of a New-Mexican sunset.

"I come from Eloise." The sadness of her face and voice even the Indian's self-control could not conceal.

"She is sad, but brave, and her mother loves her and calls her 'Little One.' She will never grow up to her mother. But"--Little Blue Flower's voice faltered and she gazed out at the far Sandia peaks wrapped in the rich purple folds of twilight, with the scarlet of the afterglow beyond them--"Eloise loves Beverly. She will always love him. Heaven meant him for her." There were some other broken sentences, but I did not grasp them clearly then.

The world was full of gray shadows. The finishing touches had been put on life for me. I looked out at the dying glow in the west, and wondered vaguely if the sun would ever cross the Gloriettas again, or ever the Sangre-de-Christo grow radiant with the scarlet stain of that ineffable beauty that uplifts and purifies the soul of him who looks on it.

---

XVII

SWEET AND BITTER WATERS

Trust me, it is something to be cast
Face to face with one's self at last,
To be taken out of the fuss and strife,
The endless clatter of plate and knife,
The bore of books, and the bores of the street,
And to be set down on one's own two feet
So nigh to the great warm heart of God,
You almost seem to feel it beat
Down from the sunshine, and up from the sod.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

My hair is very white now, and my fingers hold a pen more easily than they could hold the ox-goad or the rifle, and mine to-day is all the backward look. Which look is evermore a satisfying thing because it takes in all of life behind in its true proportion, where the forward look of youth sees only what comes next and nothing more. And looking back to-day it seems that, of the many times I walked the long miles of that old Santa Fe Trail, no journey over it stands out quite so clear-cut in my memory as the home trip after I had watched the going away of Eloise, and witnessed the flight of Ferdinand Ramero, and listened to the story of Jondo's life.

When Little Blue Flower left me sitting beside Fort Marcy's wall my mind went back in swift review over the flight of days since Beverly Clarenden and I had come from Cincinnati. I recalled the first meeting of Eloise with my cousin. How easily they had renewed acquaintance. I had been surprised and embarrassed and awkward when I found her and Little Blue Flower down by the Flat Rock below St. Ann's, in the Moon of the Peach Blossom. I remembered how I had monopolized all of her time in the days that followed, leaving good-natured Bev to look after the little Indian girl who never really seemed like an Indian to him. And keen-piercing as an arrow came now the memory of that midnight hour when I had seen the two in the little side porch of the Clarenden home, and again I heard the sorrowful words:

"Oh, Beverly, it breaks my heart."

Eloise had just seen Beverly kiss Little Blue Flower in the shadows of the porch. And all the while, good-hearted, generous boy that he was, he had never tried to push his suit with her, had made her love him more, no doubt, by letting me have full command of all of her time, while he forgot himself in showing courtesy to the Indian girl, because Bev was first of all a gentleman. I thought of that dear hour in the church of San Miguel. Of course, Eloise was glad to find me there--poor, hunted, frightened child! She would have been as glad, no doubt, to have found big Bill Banney or Rex Krane, and I had thought her eyes held something just for me that night. She had not seen Beverly at the chapel beside the San Christobal River, and to me she had not given even a parting glance when she went away. If she had cared for me at all she would not have left me so. And I had climbed the tortuous trail with her and stood beside her in the zone of sanctuary safety that Father Josef had thrown about us two.

These things were clear enough to me, but when I tried to think again of all that Little Blue Flower had said an hour ago my mind went numb:

"Her mother knew her, but only as the little Eloise long lost and never missed till now. The mother, too, was very beautiful, and young in face, and child-like in her helplessness. The lonely ranch-house, old, and strong as a fort, girt round by tall cañon walls, nestled in a grassy open place; and not a comfort had been denied the woman there. For Gloria Ramero, Ferdinand's wife, had governed that. And Eloise had entered there to stay. This much was clear enough. But that which followed seemed to twist and writhe about in my mind with only one thing sure--Eloise loved Beverly, would always love him. And he could not love any one else. He could be kind to any girl, but he would not be happy. Some day when he was older--a real man--then he would long for the girl of his heart and his own choice, and he would find her and love her, too, and she would love him and those who stood between them they both would hate. And Eloise loved Beverly. She could not send Gail any words herself, but he would understand."

So came the Indian girl's interpretation of the case, but the conclusion was the message meant for me. I wondered vaguely, as I sat there, if the vision had come to Beverly years ago as it had come to me: three men--the soldier on his cavalry mount, Jondo, the plainsman, on his big black horse, and between the two, Esmond Clarenden, neither mounted nor on foot, but going forward somehow, steady and sure. And beyond these three, this side of misty mountain peaks, the cloud of golden hair, the sweet face, with dark eyes looking into mine. I had not been a dreamer, I had been a fool.

Through Beverly I learned the next day that Ferdinand Ramero had come into Santa Fé late at night and had left early the next morning. Marcos Ramero, faultlessly dressed, lounged about the gambling-halls, and strolled through the sunny Plaza, idly and insolently, as was his custom. But Gloria Ramero, to whom Marcos long ago ceased to be more than coldly courteous, had left the city at once for the San Christobal Valley, to devote herself to the care of the beautiful woman whom her brother Felix Narveo in his college days had admired so much.

As for Jondo, years ago when we had met Father Josef out by the sandy arroyo, he had left us to follow the good man somewhere, and had not come back to the Exchange Hotel until nightfall. Something had come into his face that day that never left it again. And now that something had deepened in the glance of his eye and the firm-set mouth. It was through that meeting with Father Josef that he had first heard of the supposed death of Mary Marchland St. Vrain, and it was through the priest in the chapel he had heard that she was still alive.

Neither Beverly nor Bill Banney nor Rex Krane knew what I had heard in the church concerning Jondo's early career, and I never spoke of it to them. But to all of us, outside of that intensified something indefinable in his face, he was unchanged. He met my eye with the open, frank glance with which he met the gaze of all men. His smile was no less engaging and his manner remained the same--fearless, unsuspicious, definite in serious affairs, good-natured and companionable in everything. I could not read him now, by one little line, but back of everything lay that withering, grievous thought--he was a murderer. Heaven pity the boy when his idol falls, and if he be a dreaming idealist the hurt is tenfold deeper.

And yet--the trail was waiting there to teach me many things, and Jondo's words rang through the aisles of my brain:

"If you ever have a real cross, Gail, thank the Lord for the open plains and the green prairies, and the danger stimulus of the old Santa Fé Trail. They will seal up your wounds, and soften your hard, rebellious heart, and make you see things big, and despise the little crooks in your path."

Our Conestoga wagons, with their mule-teams, and the few ponies for scout service, followed the old trail out of the valley of the Rio Grande to the tablelands eastward, up the steep sidling way into the passes of the Glorietta Mountains, down through lone, wind-swept cañons, and on between wild, scarred hills, coming, at last, beyond the picturesque ridges, snow-crowned and mesa-guarded, into the long, gray, waterless lands of the Cimmarron country. Here we journeyed along monotonous levels that rose and fell unnoted because of lack of landmarks to measure by, only the broad, beaten Santa Fé Trail stretched on unbending, unchanging, uneffaceable.

As the distance from spring to spring decreased, every drop of water grew precious, and we pushed on, eager to reach the richer prairies of the Arkansas Valley. Suddenly in the monotony of the way, and the increasing calls of thirst, there came a sense of danger, the plains-old danger of the Comanche on the Cimarron Trail. Bill Banney caught it first--just a faint sign of one hostile track. All the next day Jondo scouted far, coming into camp at nightfall with a grave report.

"The water-supply is failing," he told us, "and there is something wrong out there. The Comanches are hovering near, that's certain, and there is a single trail that doesn't look Comanche to me that I can't account for. All we can do is to 'hold fast,'" he added, with his cheery smile that never failed him.

That night I could not sleep, and the stars and I stared long at each other. They were so golden and so far away. And one, as I looked, slipped from its place and trailed wide across the sky until it vanished, leaving a stream of golden light that lingered before my eyes. I thought of the trail in the San Christobal Valley, and again I saw the sunlight on golden hair as Eloise with Little Blue Flower passed out of sight around the shoulder of a great rock beside the way. At last came sleep, and in my dreams Eloise was beside me as she had been in the church of San Miguel, her dark eyes looking up into mine. I knew, in my dream, that I was dreaming and I did not want to waken. For, "Eloise loved Beverly, would always love him." Little Blue Flower had said it. The face was far away, this side of misty mountain peaks, and farther still. I could see only the eyes looking at me. I wakened to see only the stars looking at me. I slept again deeply and dreamlessly, and wakened suddenly. We were far and away from the Apache country, but there, for just one instant, a face came close to mine--the face of Santan--the Apache. It vanished instantly as it had come. The night guard passed by me and crossed the camp. The stars held firm above me. I had had another dream. But after that I did not sleep till dawn.

The day was very hot, with the scorching breeze of the plains that sears the very eyeballs dry. Through the dust and glare we pressed on over long, white, monotonous miles. Hovering near us somewhere were the Comanches--waiting; with us was burning thirst; ahead of us ran the taunting mirage--cool, sparkling water rippling between green banks--receding as we approached, maddening us by the suggestion of its refreshing picture, the while we knew it was only a picture. For it is Satan's own painting on the desert to let men know that Dante's dream is mild compared to the real art of torment. Men and animals began to give way under the day's burden, and we moved slowly. In times like these Jondo stayed with the train, sending Bill Banney and Beverly scouting ahead. That was the longest day that I ever lived on the Santa Fé Trail, although I followed its miles many times in the best of its freighting years.

The weary hours dragged at last toward evening, and a dozen signs in plains lore told us that water must be near. As we topped a low swell at the bottom of whose long slide lay the little oasis we were seeking, we came upon Bill Banney's pony lying dead across the trail. And near it Bill himself, with bloated face and bleared eyes, muttering half-coherently:

"Water-hole! Poison! Don't drink!"

And then he babbled of the muddy Missouri, and the Kentucky blue grass, and cold mountain springs in the passes of the Gloriettas, warning us thickly of "death down there."

"Down there," beside the little spring shelved in by shale at the lower edge of the swell, we found a tiny cairn built of clumps of sod and bits of shale. Fastened on it was a scrap from Bill's note-book with the words

Spring poisoned. Bev gone for water not very far on.--BILL.

So Bill had drunk the poisoned water and had tried to reach us. But for fear he might not do it, he had scrawled this warning and left it here. Brave Bill! How madly he had staggered round the place and threshed the ground in agony when he tried to mount his poisoned pony, and his first thought was for us. The plains made men see big. Jondo had told me they could do it. Poor Bill, moaning for water now and tossing in agony in Jondo's wagon! The Comanches had been cunning in their malice. How we hated them as we stood looking at the waters of that poisoned spring!

Rex Krane's big, gentle hands were holding Bill's. Rex always had a mother's heart; while Jondo read the ground with searching glance.

"We will wait here a little while. Bev will report soon, I hope. Come, Gail," he said to me. "Here is something we will follow now."

A single trail led far away from the beaten road toward a stretch of coarse dry yucca and loco-weeds that hid a little steep-sided draw across the plains. At the bottom of it a man lay face downward beside a dead pony. We scrambled down, shattering the dry earth after us as we went. Jondo gently lifted the body and turned it face upward. It was Ferdinand Ramero.

The big plainsman did not cry out, nor drop his hold, but his face turned gray, and only the dying man saw the look in the blue eyes gazing into his. Ramero tried to draw away, fear, and hate, and the old dominant will that ruled his life, strong still in death. As he lay at the feet of the man whose life hopes he had blasted, he expected no mercy and asked for none.

"You have me at last. I didn't put the poison in that spring. I would not have drunk it if I had. It was the one below I fixed for you. And I'm in your power now. Be quick about it."

For one long minute Jondo looked down at his enemy. Then he lifted his eyes to mine with the victory of "him that overcometh" shining in their blue depths.

"If I could make you live, I'd do it, Fred. If you have any word to say, be quick about it now. Your time is short."

The sweetness of that gentle voice I hear sometimes to-day in the low notes of song-birds, and the gentle swish of refreshing summer showers.

Ferdinand Ramero lifted his cold blue eyes and looked at the man bending over him.

"Leave me here--forgotten--"

"Not of God. His Mercy endureth forever," Jondo replied.

But there was no repentance, no softening of the hard, imperious heart.

We left him there, pulling down the loose earth from the steep sides of the draw to cover him from all the frowning elements of the plains. And when we went back to the waiting train Jondo reported, grimly:

" No enemy in sight ."

We laid Bill Banney beside the poisoned spring, from whose bitter waters he had saved our lives. So martyrs filled the unknown graves that made the milestones of the way in the days of commerce-building on the old Santa Fé Trail.

The next spring was not far ahead, as Bill's note had said, but the stars were thick above us and the desolate land was full of shadows before we reached it--a thirst-mad, heart-sore crowd trailing slowly on through the gloom of the night.

Beverly was waiting for us and the refreshing moisture of the air above a spring seemed about him.

"I thought you'd never come. Where's Bill? There's water here. I made the spring myself," he shouted, as we came near.

The spring that he had digged for us was in the sandy bed of a dry stream, with low, earth-banks on either side. It was full of water, hardly clear, but plentiful, and slowly washing out a bigger pool for itself as it seeped forth.

"There is poison in the real spring down there." Beverly pointed toward the diminished fountain we had expected to find. "I've worked since noon at this."

We drank, and life came back to us. We pitched camp, and then listened to Beverly's story of the sweet and bitter waters of the trail that day. And all the while it seemed as if Bill Banney was just out of sight and might come galloping in at any moment.

"You know what happened up the trail," my cousin said, sadly. "Bill was ahead of me and he drank first, and galloped back to warn me and beg me to come on for water. I thought I could get down here and take some water back to Bill in time. It's all shale up there. No place to dig above, nor below, even if one dared to dig below that poison. But I found a dead coyote that had just left here, and all springs began to look Comanche to me. I lariated my pony and crept down under the bank there to think and rest. Everything went poison-spotted before my eyes."

"Where's your pony now, Bev?" Jondo asked.

"I don't know sure, but I expect he is about going over the Raton Pass by this time," Beverly replied. "Down there things seemed to swim around me like water everywhere and I knew I'd got to stir. Just then an Indian came slipping up from somewhere to the spring to drink. He didn't look right to me at all, but I couldn't sit still and see him kill himself. If he needed killing I could have done it for him, for he never saw me. Just as he stooped I saw his face. It was that Apache--Santan--the wander-foot, for I never heard of an Apache getting so far from the mountains. I ought to have kept still, Jondo"--Beverly's ready smile came to his face--"but I'd made that fellow swear he'd let me eternally alone when we had our little fracas up by the San Christobal Arroyo, so something like conscience, mean as the stomach-ache, made me call out:

"'Don't drink there; it's poison.'

"He stopped and stared at me a minute, or ten minutes--I didn't count time on him--and then he said, slow-like:

"'It's the spring west that is poisoned. I put it there for you. You will not see your men again. They will drink and die. Who put this poison here?'

"'Lord knows. I didn't,' I told him. 'Two of you carrying poison are two too many for the Cimarron country.'

"And I hadn't any more conscience after that, but I was faint and slow, and my aim was bad for eels. He could have fixed me right then, but for some reason he didn't."

Beverly's face grew sad.

"He made six jumps six ways, and caught my pony's lariat. I can hear his yell still as he tore a hole in the horizon and jumped right through. Then I began on that spring. 'Dig or die. Dig or die.' I said over and over, and we are all here but Bill. I wish I'd got that Apache, though."

Jondo and I looked at each other.

"The thing is clear now," he said, aside to me. "That single trail I found back yonder day before yesterday was Santan's running on ahead of us to poison the water for us and then steal a horse and make his way back to the mountains. An Apache can live on this cactus-covered sand the same as a rattlesnake. He fixed the upper spring and came down here to drink. Only Beverly's conscience saved him here. Heaven knows how Fred Ramer got out here. He may have come with some Mexicans on ahead of us and left them here to drop his poison in this lower spring. Then he turned back toward Santa Fé and found his doom up there at Santan's spring.

"I'm like Bev. I wish he had gotten the Apache, now. I don't know yet how I was fooled in him, for he has always been Fred Ramer's tool, and Father Josef never trusted him. And to think that Bill Banney, in no way touching any of our lives, should have been martyred by the crimes of Fred and this Apache! But that's the old, old story of the trail. Poor Bill! I hope his sleep will be sweet out in this desolate land. We'll meet him later somewhere."

The winds must have carried the tale of poisoned water across the Cimarron country, for the Comanches' trail left ours from that day. Through threescore and ten miles to the Arkansas River we came, and there was not a well nor spring nor sign of water in all that distance. What water we had we carried with us from the Cimarron fountains. But the sturdy endurance of the days was not without its help to me. And the wide, wind-swept prairies of Kansas taught me many things. In the lonely, beautiful land, through long bright days and starlit nights, I began to see things bigger than my own selfish measure had reckoned. I thought of Esmond Clarenden and his large scheme of business; Felix Narveo, the true-hearted friend; and of Father Josef and his life of devotion. And I lived with Jondo every day. I could not forget the hour in the little ruined chapel in the San Christobal Valley, and how he himself had made no effort to clear his own name. But I remembered, too, that Father Josef, mercilessly just to Ferdinand Ramero, had not even asked Jondo to defend himself from the black charge against him.

The sunny Kansas prairies, the far open plains, and the wild mountain trails beyond, had brought their blessing to Jondo, whose life had known so much of tragedy. And my cross was just my love for a girl who could not love me. That was all. Jondo had never forgotten nor ceased to love the mother of Eloise St. Vrain. I should be like Jondo in this. But the world is wide. Life is full of big things. Henceforth, while I would not forget, I, too, would be big and strong, and maybe, some time, just as sunny-faced as my big Jondo.

The trail life, day by day, did bring its blessing to me. The clear, open land, the far-sweeping winds, the solitude for thought, the bravery and gentleness of the rough men who walked the miles with me, the splendor of the day-dawn, the beauty of the sunset, the peace of the still starlit night, sealed up my wounds, and I began to live for others and to forget myself; to dream less often, and to work more gladly; to measure men, not by what had been, but by how they met what was to be done.

From all the frontier life, rough-hewn and coarse, the elements came that helped to make the big brave West to-day, and I know now that not the least of source and growth of power for these came out of the strength and strife of the things known only to the men who followed the Santa Fé Trail. KV/Y2631Yrxlh2cqsBB729RnwzvfaOpS70zQnmau1PDGfGkk3GwoyKLpGRE4ma2x

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