"We shall come to the parting of the ways to night if we make good time, Krane," Esmond Clarenden said to the young Bostonian, as we rested at noon beside the trait. "To-night we camp at Council Grove and from there on there is no turning back. I had hoped to find a big crowd waiting to start off from that place. But everybody we have met coming in says that there are no freighters going west now. Usually there is no risk in coming alone from Council Grove to the Missouri River, and there is always opportunity for company at this end of the trail."
We were sitting in a circle under the thin shade of some cottonwood-trees beside a little stream; the air of noon, hot above our heads, was tempered with a light breeze from the southwest. As my uncle spoke, Rex glanced over at Mat Nivers, sitting beside him, and then gazed out thoughtfully across the stream. I had never thought her pretty before. But now her face, tanned by the sun and wind, had a richer glow on cheek and lip. Her damp hair lay in little wavelets about her temples, and her big, sunny, gray eyes were always her best feature.
Girls made their own dresses on the frontier, and I suppose that anywhere else Mat would have appeared old-fashioned in the neat, comfortable little gowns of durable gingham and soft woolen stuffs that she made for herself. But somehow in all that long journey she was the least travel-soiled of the whole party.
At my uncle's words she looked up questioningly and I saw the bloom deepen on her cheek as she met the young man's eyes. Somebody else saw that shadow of a blush--Bill Banney lying on the ground beside me, and although he pulled his hat cautiously over his face, I thought he was listening for the answer.
The young New-Englander stared long at the green prairie before he spoke. I never knew whether it was ignorance, or a lack of energy, that was responsible for his bad grammar in those early days, for Rex Krane was no sham invalid. The lines on his young face told of suffering, and the thin, bony hands showed bodily weakness. At length he turned to my uncle.
"I started out sort of reckless on this trip," he said, slowly. "I'm nearly twenty and never been worth a dang to anybody anywhere on God's earth; so I thought I might as well be where things looked interestin'. But"--he hesitated--"I'm gettin' a lot stronger every day, a whole lot stronger. Mebby I'd be of some use afterwhile--I don't know, though. I reckon I'd better wait till we get to that Council Grove place. Sounds like a nice locality to rest and think in. Are you goin' on, anyhow, Clarenden, crowd or no crowd?"
"Though the heavens fall," my uncle answered, simply.
Jondo had turned quickly to hear this reply and a great light leaped into his deep-set blue eyes. I glanced over at Aunty Boone, sitting apart from us, as she ever chose to do, her own eyes dull, as they always were when she saw keenest; and I remembered how, back at Fort Leavenworth, she had commented on this journey, saying: "They tote together always, an' they're totin' now." Child though I was, I felt that a something more than the cargo of goods was leading my uncle to Santa Fé. What I did not understand was his motive for taking Beverly and Mat and me with him. I had been satisfied before just to go, but now I wanted very much to know why I was going.
Council Grove by the Neosho River was the end of civilization for the freighter. Beyond it the wilderness spread its untamed lengths, and excepting Bent's Fort far up the Arkansas River on the line of the first old trail, rarely followed now, it held not a sign of civilization for the traveler until he should reach the first outposts of the Mexican almost in the shadow of Santa Fé. It is no wonder that wagon-trains mobilized here, waiting for an increase in numbers before they dared to start on westward. And now there were no trains waiting for our coming. Only a gripping necessity could have led a man like Esmond Clarenden to take the trail alone in the certain perils of the plains during the middle '40's. I did not know until long afterward how brave was the loving heart that beat in that little merchant's bosom. A devotee of ease and refinement, he walked the prairie trails unafraid, and made the desert serve his will.
The dusk of evening had fallen long before we pitched camp that night under the big oak-trees in the Neosho River valley outside of the little trading-post. Up in the village a light or two gleamed faintly. From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of a violin, mingling with loud talking and boisterous laughter in a distant drinking-den. It would be some time until moon-rise, and the shadowy places thickened to blackness.
In fair weather all of us except Mat Nivers slept in the open. On stormy nights the younger men occupied one of the wagons, Jondo and Beverly another, and my uncle and myself the third. Mat had the "baby-cab" as Beverly called it, with Aunty Boone underneath it. The ground was Aunty Boone's kingdom. She sat upon it, ate from it, slept on it, and seemed no more soiled than a snake would be by the contact with it.
"Some day I goes plop under it, and be ground myself," she used to say. "Good black soil I make, too," she always added, with her low chuckle.
To-night we were all in the wagons, for the spring rains had made the Neosho valley damp and muddy. I was just on the edge of dreamless slumber when a low voice that seemed to cut the darkness caught my ear.
"Cla'nden! Cla'nden!" it hissed, softly.
My uncle slipped noiselessly out to where Aunty Boone stood, her head so near to the canvas wagon-cover inside of which I lay that I could hear all that was said.
She was always a night prowler. What other women learn now from the evening newspaper or from neighborly gossip she, being created without a sense of fear, went forth in her time and gathered at first hand.
"I been prospectin' up 'round the saloon, Cla'nden. They's a nasty mess of Mexicans in town, all gettin' drunk."
Then I heard a faint rustle of the bushes and I knew that the woman was slipping away to her place under the wagon. I remembered the Mexican whom I had last seen across the street from the Clarenden store in Independence. These were bad Mexicans, as Aunty Boone had said, and that man had seemed in a silent way a friend of my uncle. I wondered what would happen next. It soon happened. My uncle Esmond came inside the wagon and called, softly:
"Gail, wake up."
"I'm awake," I replied, in a half-whisper, as alert as a mystery-loving boy could be.
"Slip over to Jondo and tell him there are Mexicans in town, and I'm going across the river to see what's up. Tell him to wake up everybody and have them stay in the wagons till I get back."
He slid away and the shadows ate him. I followed as far as Jondo's wagon, and gave my message. As I came back something seemed to slip away before me and disappear somewhere. I dived into our wagon and crouched down, waiting with beating heart for Uncle Esmond to come back. Once I thought I heard the sound of a horse's feet on the trail to the eastward, but I was not sure.
All was still and black in the little camp for a long time, and then Esmond Clarenden and Rex Krane crept into the wagon and dropped the flap behind them.
"Krane, have you decided about this trip yet?" Uncle Esmond asked. "If not, you'd better get right up into town and forget us. You can't be too quick about it, either."
"Ain't we going to stay here a few days? Why do you want to know to-night?"
Rex Krane, Yankee-like, met the query with a query.
"Because there's a pretty strong party of Mexican desperadoes here who are going on east, and they mean trouble for somebody. I shouldn't care to meet them with our strength alone. They are all pretty drunk now and getting wilder every minute. Listen to that!"
A yell across the river broke the night stillness.
"There is no telling how soon they may be over here, hunting for us. We must get by them some way, for I cannot risk a fight with them here. Which chance will you choose, the possibility of being overtaken by that Mexican gang going east, or the perils of the plains and the hostility of New Mexico right now? It's about as broad one way as the other for safety, with staying here for a time as the only middle course at present. But that is a perfectly safe one for you."
"I am going on with you," Rex Krane said, with his slow Yankee drawl. "When danger gets close, then I scatter. There's more chance in seven hundred miles to miss somethin' than there is in a hundred and fifty. And even a half-invalid might be of some use. Say, Clarenden, how'd you get hold of this information? You turned in before I did."
"Daniel Boone went out on scout duty--self-elected. You know she considers that the earth was made for her to walk on when she chooses to use it that way. She spied trouble ahead and came back, and gave me the key to the west door of Council Grove so I could get out early," my uncle replied.
"I reckoned as much," Rex declared.
In the dark I could feel Esmond Clarenden give a start.
"What do you mean?" he inquired.
"Oh, I saw the fat lady start out, so I followed her, but I located the nest of Mexicans before she did, and got a good deal out of their drunken jargon. And then I cat-footed it back after a snaky-looking, black Spaniard that seemed to be following her. There were three of us in a row, but the devil hasn't got the hindmost one, not yet--that's me."
"You saw some one follow Daniel into camp?" my uncle broke in, anxiously. But no threatening peril ever hurried Rex Krane's speech.
"Yes, and I also followed some one; but I lost him in this ink-well of a hole, and I was waitin' till he left so I could put the cat out, an' shut the door, when you cut across the river. I've been sittin' round now to see that nothin' broke loose till you got back. Meantime, the thing sort of faded away. I heard a horse gallopin' off east, too. Mebby they are outpostin' to surround our retreat. I didn't wake Bill. He's got no more imagination than Bev. If I had needed anybody I'd have stirred up Gail, here."
In the dark I fairly swelled with pride, and from that moment Rex Krane was added to my little list of heroes that had been made up, so far, of Esmond Clarenden and Jondo and any army officer above the rank of captain.
"Krane, you'll do. I thought I had your correct measure back in Independence," Uncle Esmond said, heartily. "As to the boys, I can risk them; they are Clarendens. My anxiety is for the little orphan girl. She is only a child. I couldn't leave her behind us, and I must not let a hair of her head be harmed."
"She's a right womanly little thing," Rex Krane said, carelessly; but I wondered if in the dark his eyes might not have had the same look they had had at noon when he turned to Mat sitting beside my uncle. Maybe back at Boston he had a little sister of his own like her. Anyhow, I decided then that men's words and faces do not always agree.
Again the roar of voices broke out, and we scrambled from the wagon and quickly gathered our company together.
"What did you find out?" Jondo asked.
"We must clear out of here right away and get through to the other side of town and be off by daylight without anybody knowing it. They are a gang of ugly Mexicans who would not let us cross the river if we should wait till morning. They have already sent a spy over here, and they are waiting for him to report."
"Where is he now?" Bill Banney broke in.
"They's two of him--I know there is," Rex Krane declared. "One of him went east, to cut us off I reckon; an' t'other faded into nothin' toward the river. Kind of a double deal, looks to me."
Both men looked doubtingly at the young man; but without further words, Jondo took command, and we knew that the big plainsman would put through whatever Esmond Clarenden had planned. For Aunty Boone was right when she said, "They tote together."
"We must snake these wagons through town, as though we didn't belong together, but we mustn't get too far apart, either. And remember now, Clarenden, if anybody has to stop and visit with 'em, I'll do it myself," Jondo said.
"Why can't we ride the ponies? We can go faster and scatter more," I urged, as we hastily broke camp.
"He is right, Esmond. They haven't been riding all their lives for nothing," Jondo agreed, as Esmond Clarenden turned hesitatingly toward Mat Nivers.
In the dim light her face seemed bright with courage. It is no wonder that we all trusted her. And trust was the large commodity of the plains in those days, when even as children we ran to meet danger with courageous daring.
"You must cross the river letting the ponies pick their own ford," Jondo commanded us. "Then go through to the ridge on the northwest side of town. Keep out of the light, and if anybody tries to stop you, ride like fury for the ridge."
"Lemme go first," Aunty Boone interposed. "Nobody lookin' for me this side of purgatory. 'Fore they gets over their surprise I'll be gone. Whoo-ee!"
The soft exclamation had a breath of bravery in it that stirred all of us.
"You are right, Daniel. Lead out. Keep to the shadows. If you must run make your mules do record time," Uncle Esmond said.
"You'll find me there when you stop," Rex Krane declared. No sick man ever took life less seriously. "I'm goin' ahead to John-the-Baptist this procession and air the parlor bedrooms."
"Krane, you are an invalid and a fool. You'd better ride in the wagon with me," Bill Banney urged.
"Mebby I am. Don't throw it up to me, but I'm no darned coward, and I'm foot-loose. It's my job to give the address of welcome over t'other side of this Mexican settlement."
The tall, thin young man slouched his cap carelessly on his head and strode away toward the river. Youth was reckless in those days, and the trail was the home of dramatic opportunity. But none of us had dreamed hitherto of Rex Krane's degree of daring and his stubborn will.
The big yellow moon was sailing up from the east; the Neosho glistened all jet and silver over its rough bed; the great shadowy oaks looked ominously after us as we moved out toward the threatening peril before us. Slowly, as though she had time to kill, Aunty Boone sent the brown mule and trusty dun down to the river's rock-bottom ford. Slowly and unconcernedly she climbed the slope and passed up the single street toward the saloon she had already "prospected." Pausing a full minute, she swung toward a far-off cabin light to the south, jogging over the rough ground noisily. The door of the drinking-den was filled with dark faces as the crowd jostled out. Just a lone wagon making its way somewhere about its own business, that was all.
As the crowd turned in again three ponies galloped up the street toward the slope leading out to the high level prairies beyond the Neosho valley. But who could guess how furiously three young hearts beat, and how tightly three pairs of young hands clutched the bridle reins as we surged forward, forgetting the advice to keep in the shadow.
Just after we had crossed the river, a man on horseback fell in behind us. We quickened our speed, but he gained on us. Before we reached the saloon he was almost even with us, keeping well in the shadow all the while. In the increasing moonlight, making everything clear to the eye, I gave one quick glance over my shoulder and saw that the horseman was a Mexican. I have lived a life so fraught with danger that I should hardly remember the feeling of fear but for the indelible imprint of that one terrified minute in the moonlit street of Council Grove.
Two ruffians on watch outside the saloon sprang up with yells. The door burst open and a gang of rowdies fairly spilled out around us. We three on our ponies had the instinctive security on horseback of children born to the saddle, else we should never have escaped from the half-drunken crew. I recall the dust of striking hoofs, the dark forms dodging everywhere, the Mexican rider keeping between us and the saloon door, and most of all I remember one glimpse of Mat Nivers's face with big, staring eyes, and firm-set mouth; and I remember my fleeting impression that she could take care of herself if we could; and over all a sudden shadow as the moon, in pity of our terror, hid its face behind a tiny cloud.
When it shone out again we were dashing by separate ways up the steep slope to the west ridge, but, strangely enough, the Mexican horseman with a follower or two had turned away from us and was chasing off somewhere out of sight.
Up on top of the bluff, with Rex Krane and Aunty Boone, we watched and waited. The wooded Neosho valley full of inky blackness seemed to us like a bottomless gorge of terror which no moonlight could penetrate. We strained our ears to catch the rattle of the wagons, but the noise from the saloon, coming faintly now and then, was all the sound we could hear save the voices of the night rising up from the river, and the whisperings of the open prairie to the west.
In that hour Rex Krane became our good angel.
"Keep the law, 'Hold fast'! You made a splendid race of it, and if Providence made that fellow lose you gettin' out, and led him and his gang sideways from you, I reckon she will keep on takin' care of you till Clarenden resumes control, so don't you worry."
But for his brave presence the terror of that lonely watch would have been harder than the peril of the street, for he seemed more like a gentle mother than the careless, scoffing invalid of the trail.
Midnight came, and the chill of midnight. We huddled together in our wagon and still we waited. Down in the village the lights still burned, and angry voices with curses came to our ears at intervals.
Meantime the three men across the river moved cautiously, hoping that we were safe on the bluff, and knowing that they dared not follow us too rapidly. The wagons creaked and the harness rattled noisily in the night stillness, as slowly, one by one, they lumbered through the darkness across the river and up the bank to the village street. Here they halted and grouped together.
"We must hide out and wait, Clarenden," Jondo counciled. "I hope the ponies and the wagon ahead are safe, but they stirred things up. If we go now we'll all be caught."
The three wagons fell apart and halted wide of the trail where the oak-trees made the blackest shade. The minutes dragged out like hours, and the anxiety for the unprotected group on the bluff made the three men frantic to hurry on. But Jondo's patience equaled his courage, and he always took the least risk. It was nearly midnight, and every noise was intensified. If a mule but moved it set up a clatter of harness chains that seemed to fill the valley.
At last a horseman, coming suddenly from somewhere, rode swiftly by each shadow-hidden wagon, half pausing at the sound of the mules stamping in their places, and then he hurried up the street.
"Three against the crowd. If we must fight, fight to kill," Jondo urged, as the ready firearms were placed for action.
In a minute or two the crew broke out of the saloon and filled the moonlit street, all talking and swearing in broken Spanish.
"Not come yet!"
"Pedro say they be here to-morrow night!" "We wait till to-morrow night!"
And with many wild yells they fell back for a last debauch in the drinking-den.
"I don't understand it," Jondo declared. "That fellow who rode by here ought to have located every son of us, but if they want to wait till to-morrow night it suits me."
An hour later, when the village was in a dead sleep, three wagons slowly pulled up the long street and joined the waiting group at the top, and the crossing over was complete.
Dawn was breaking as our four wagons, followed by the ponies, crept away in the misty light. As we trailed off into the unknown land, I looked back at the bluff below which nestled the last houses we were to see for seven hundred miles. And there, outlined against the horizon, a Mexican stood watching us. I had seen the same man one day riding up from the ravine southwest of Fort Leavenworth. I had seen him dashing toward the river the next day. I had watched him sitting across the street from the Clarenden store in Independence.
I wondered if it might have been this man who had hung about our camp the evening before, and if it might have been this same man who rode between us and the saloon mob, leading the crowd after him and losing us on the side of the bluff. And as we had eluded the Council Grove danger, I wondered what would come next, and if he would be in it.
[V]
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
"So I draw the world together, link by link."
--KIPLING.
Day after day we pushed into the unknown wilderness. No wagon-trains passed ours moving eastward. No moccasined track in the dust of the trail gave hint of any human presence near. Where to-day the Pullman car glides in smooth comfort, the old Santa Fé Trail lay like a narrow brown ribbon on the green desolation of Nature's unconquered domain. Out beyond the region of long-stemmed grasses, into the short-grass land, we pressed across a pathless field-of-the-cloth-of-green, gemmed with myriads of bright blossoms--broad acres on acres that the young years of a coming century should change into great wheat-fields to help fill the granaries of the world. How I reveled in it--that far-stretching plain of flower-starred verdure! It was my world--mine, unending, only softening out into lavender mists that rimmed it round in one unbroken fold of velvety vapor.
At last we came to the Arkansas River--flat-banked, sand-bottomed, wide, wandering, impossible thing--whose shallow waters followed aimlessly the line of least resistance, back and forth across its bed. Rivers had meant something to me. The big muddy Missouri for Independence and Fort Leavenworth, that its steamers might bring the soldiers, and my uncle's goods to their places. The little rivers that ran into the big ones, to feed their currents for down-stream service. The creeks, that boys might wade and swim and fish, else Beverly would have lived unhappily all his days. But here was a river that could neither fetch nor carry. Nobody lived near it, and it had no deep waters like our beloved, ugly old Missouri. I loved the level prairies, but I didn't like that river, somehow. I felt exposed on its blank, treeless borders, as if I stood naked and defenseless, with no haven of cover from the enemies of the savage plains.
The late afternoon was hot, the sky was dust-dimmed, the south wind feverish and strength-sapping. At dawn we had sighted a peak against the western horizon. We were approaching it now--a single low butte, its front a sheer stone bluff facing southward toward the river, it lifted its head high above the silent plains; and to the north it stretched in a long gentle slope back to a lateral rim along the landscape. The trail crept close about its base, as if it would cling lovingly to this one shadow-making thing amid all the open, blaring, sun-bound miles stretching out on either side of it.
As Beverly and I were riding in front of Mat's wagon, of which we had elected ourselves the special guardians, Rex Krane came up alongside Bill Banney's team in front of us. The young men were no such hard-and-fast friends as Beverly and I. For some reason they had little to say to each other.
"Is that what you call Pike's Peak, Bill?" Rex asked.
"No, the mountains are a month away. That's Pawnee Rock, and I'll breathe a lot freer when we get out of sight of that infernal thing," Bill replied.
"What's its offense?" Rex inquired.
"It's the peak of perdition, the bottomless pit turned inside out," Bill declared.
"I don't see the excuse for a rock sittin' out here, sayin' nothin', bein' called all manner of unpleasant names," the young Bostonian insisted.
"Well, I reckon you'd find one mighty quick if you ever heard the soldiers at Fort Leavenworth talk about it once. All the plainsmen dread it. Jondo says more men have been killed right around this old stone Sphinx than any other one spot in North America, outside of battle-fields."
"Happy thought! Do their ghosts rise up and walk at midnight? Tell me more," Rex urged.
"Nobody walks. Everybody runs. There was a terrible Indian fight here once; the Pawnees in the king-row, and all the hosts of the Midianites, and Hivites, and Jebusites, Kiowa, Comanche, and Kaw, rag-tag and bobtail, trying to get 'em out. I don't know who won, but the citadel got christened Pawnee Rock. It took a fountain filled with blood to do it, though."
Rex Krane gave a long whistle.
"I believe Bill is trying to scare him, Bev," I murmured.
"I believe he's just precious wasting time," Beverly replied.
"And so," Bill continued, "it came to be a sort of rock of execution where romances end and they die happily ever afterward. The Indians get up there and, being able to read fine print with ease as far away as either seacoast, they can watch any wagon-train from the time it leaves Council Grove over east to Bent's Fort on the Purgatoire Creek out west; and having counted the number of men, and the number of bullets in each man's pouch, they slip down and jump on the train as it goes by. If the men can make it to beat them to the top of the rock, as they do sometimes, they can keep the critters off, unless the Indians are strong enough to keep them up there and sit around and wait till they starve for water, and have to come down. It's a grim old fortress, and never needs a garrison. Indians or white men up there, sometimes they defend and sometimes attack. But it's a bad place always, and on account of having our little girl along--" Bill paused. "A fellow gets to see a lot of country out here," he added.
"Banney, just why didn't you join the army? You'd have a chance to see a lot more of the country, if this Mexican War goes on," Rex Krane said, meditatively.
"I'd rather be my own captain and order myself to the front, and likewise command my rear-guard to retire, whenever I doggone please," Bill said. "It isn't the soldiers that'll do this country the most good. They are useful enough when they are useful, Lord knows. And we'll always need a decent few of 'em around to look after women and children, and invalids," he went on. "I tell you, Krane, it's men like Clarenden that's going to make these prairies worth something one of these days. The men who build up business, not them that shoot and run to or from. That's what the West's got to have. I'm through going crazy about army folks. One man that buys and sells, if he gives good weight and measure, is, himself, a whole regiment for civilization."
Just then Jondo halted the train, and we gathered about him.
"Clarenden, let's pitch camp at the rock. The horses are dead tired and this wind is making them nervous. There's a storm due as soon as it lays a bit, and we would be sort of protected here. A tornado's a giant out in this country, you know."
"This tavern doesn't have a very good name with the traveling public, does it, Clarenden?" Rex Krane suggested.
"Not very," my uncle replied. "But in case of trouble, the top of it isn't a bad place to shoot from."
"What if the other fellow gets there first?" Bill Banney inquired.
"We can run from here as easily as any other place," Jondo assured us. "I haven't seen a sign of Indians yet. But we've got to be careful. This point has a bad reputation, and I naturally begin to feel Indians in the air as soon as I come in sight of it. If we need the law of the trail anywhere, we need it here," he admonished.
Beverly and I drew close together. We were in the land of bad Indians, but nothing had happened to us yet, and we could not believe that any danger was near us now, although we were foolishly half hoping that there might be, for the excitement of it.
"There's no place in a million miles for anybody to hide, Bill. Where would Jondo's Indians be?" Beverly asked, as we were getting into camp order for the night.
Beverly's disposition to demand proof was as strong here as it had been in the matter of rivers turning their courses, and fishes playing leap-frog.
"They might be behind that ridge out north, and have a scout lying flat on the top of old Pawnee Rock, up there, lookin' benevolently down at us over the rim of his spectacles right now," Bill replied, as he pulled the corral ropes out of the wagon.
"What makes you think so?" I asked, eagerly.
"What Jondo said about his feeling Indians, I guess, but he reads these prairie trails as easy as Robinson Crusoe read Friday's footprints in the sand, and he hasn't read anything in 'em yet. Indians don't fight at night, anyhow. That's one good thing. Get hold of that rope, Bev, and pull her up tight," Bill replied.
Every night our four wagons in camp made a hollow square, with space enough allowed at the corners to enlarge the corral inside for the stock. These corners were securely roped across from wagon to wagon. To-night, however, the corral space was reduced and the quartet of vehicles huddled closer together.
At dusk the hot wind came sweeping in from the southwest, a wild, lashing fury, swirling the sand in great spirals from the river bed. Our fire was put out and the blackness of midnight fell upon us. The horses were restless and the mules squealed and stamped. All night the very spirit of fear seemed to fill the air.
Just before daybreak a huge black storm-cloud came boiling up out of the southwest, with a weird yellow band across the sky before it. Overhead the stars shed a dim light on the shadowy face of the plains. A sudden whisper thrilled the camp, chilling our hearts within us.
"Indians near!" We all knew it in a flash.
Jondo, on guard, had caught the sign first. Something creeping across the trail, not a coyote, for it stood upright a moment, then bent again, and was lost in the deep gloom. Jondo had shifted to another angle of the outlook, had seen it again, and again at a third point. It was encircling the camp. Then all of us, except Jondo, began to see moving shapes. He saw nothing for a long time, and our spirits rose again.
"You must have been mistaken, Jondo," Rex Krane ventured, as he stared into the black gloom. "Maybe it was just this infernal wind. It's one darned sea-breeze of a zephyr."
"I've crossed the plains before. I wasn't mistaken," the big plainsman replied. "If I had been, you'd still see it. The trouble is that it is watching now. Everybody lay low. It will come to life again. I hope there's only one of it."
We had hardly moved after the first alarm, except to peer about and fancy that dark objects were closing in upon us.
It did come to life again. This time on Jondo's side of the camp. Something creeping near, and nearer.
The air was motionless and hot above us, the upper heavens were beginning to be threshed across by clouds, and the silence hung like a weight upon us. Then suddenly, just beyond the camp, a form rose from the ground, stood upright, and stretched out both arms toward us. And a low cry, "Take me. I die," reached our ears.
Still Jondo commanded silence. Indians are shrewd to decoy their foes out of the security of the camp. The form came nearer--a little girl, no larger than our Mat--and again came the low call. The voice was Indian, the accent Spanish, but the words were English.
"Come to us!" Esmond Clarenden answered back in a clear, low tone; and slowly and noiselessly the girl approached the camp.
I can feel it all now, although that was many years ago: the soft starlight on the plains; the hot, still air holding its breath against the oncoming tornado; the group of wagons making a deeper shadow in the dull light; beyond us the bold front of old Pawnee Rock, huge and gray in the gloom; our little company standing close together, ready to hurl a shower of bullets if this proved but the decoy of a hidden foe; and the girl with light step drawing nearer. Clad in the picturesque garb of the Southwest Indian, her hair hanging in a great braid over each shoulder, her dark eyes fixed on us, she made a picture in that dusky setting that an artist might not have given to his brush twice in a lifetime on the plains.
A few feet from us she halted.
"Throw up your hands!" Jondo commanded.
The slim brown arms were flung above the girl's head, and I caught the glint of quaintly hammered silver bracelets, as she stepped forward with that ease of motion that generations of moccasined feet on sand and sod and stone can give.
"Take me," she cried, pleadingly. "The Mexicans steal me from my people and bring me far away. They meet Kiowa. Kiowa beat me; make me slave."
She held up her hands. They were lacerated and bleeding. She slipped the bright blanket from her brown shoulder. It was bruised and swollen.
"You go to Santa Fé? Take me. I do you good, not bad."
"What would these Kiowas do to us, then?"
It was Bill Banney who spoke.
"They follow you--kill you."
"Oh, cheerful! I wish you were twins," Rex Krane said, softly.
Jondo lifted his hand.
"Let me talk to her," he said.
Then in her own language he got her story.
"Here we are." He turned to us. "Stolen from her people by the Mexicans, probably the same ones we passed in Council Grove; traded to the Kiowas out here somewhere, beaten, and starved, and held for ransom, or trade to some other tribe. They are over there behind Pawnee Rock. They got sight of us somehow, but they don't intend to bother us. They are on the lookout for a bigger train. She has slipped away while they sleep. If we send her back she will be beaten and made a slave. If we keep her, they will follow us for a fight. They are fifty to our six. What shall we do?"
"We don't need any Indians to help us get into trouble. We are sure enough of it without that," Bill Banney declared. "And what's one Indian, anyhow? She's just--"
"Just a little orphan girl like Mat," Rex Krane finished his sentence.
Bill frowned, but made no reply.
The Indian girl was standing outside the corral, listening to all that was said, her face giving no sign of the struggle between hope and despair that must have striven within her.
"Uncle Esmond, let's take her, and take our chances." Beverly's boyish voice had a defiant tone, for the spirit of adventure was strong within him. The girl turned quickly and a great light leaped into her eyes at the boy's words.
"Save a life and lose ours. It's not the rule of the plains, but--there's a higher law like that somewhere, Clarenden," Jondo said, earnestly.
The girl came swiftly toward Uncle Esmond and stood upright before him.
"I will not hide the truth. I go back to Kiowas. They sell me for big treasure. They will not harm you," she said. "I stay with you, they say you steal me, and they come at the first bird's song and kill you every one. They are so many."
She stood motionless before him, the seal of grim despair on her young face.
"What's your name?" Esmond Clarenden asked. "Po-a-be. In your words, `Little Blue Flower,'" the girl said.
"Then, Little Blue Flower, you must stay with us."
She pointed toward the eastern sky where a faint light was beginning to show above the horizon. "See, the day comes!"
"Then we will break camp now," my uncle said.
"Not in the face of this storm, Clarenden," Jondo declared. "You can fight an Indian. You can't do a thing but 'hold fast' in one of these hurricanes."
The air was still and hot. The black cloud swept swiftly onward, with the weird yellow glow before it. In the solitude of the plains the trail showed like a ghostly pathway of peril. Before us loomed that grim rock bluff, behind whose crest lay the sleeping band of Kiowas. It was only because they slept that Little Blue Flower could steal away in hope of rescue.
Hotter grew the air and darker the swiftly rolling clouds; black and awful stood old Pawnee Rock with the silent menace of its sleeping enemy. In the stillness of the pause before the storm burst we heard Jondo's voice commanding us. With our first care for the frightened stock, we grouped ourselves together as he ordered close under the bluff.
Suddenly an angry wind leaped out of the sky, beating back the hot dead air with gigantic flails of fury. Then the storm broke with tornado rage and cloudburst floods, and in its track terror reigned. Beverly and I clung together, and, holding a hand of each, Mat Nivers crouched beside us, herself strong in this second test of courage as she had been in the camp that night at Council Grove.
I have never been afraid of storms and I can never understand why timid folk should speak of them as of a living, self-directing force bent purposely on human destruction. I love the splendor of the lightning and the thunder's peal. From our earliest years, Beverly and Mat and I had watched the flood-waters of the Missouri sweep over the bottomlands, and we had heard the winds rave, and the cannonading of the angry heavens. But this mad blast of the prairie storm was like nothing we had ever seen or heard before. A yellow glare filled the sky, a half-illumined, evil glow, as if to hide what lay beyond it. One breathed in fine sand, and tasted the desert dust. Behind it, all copper-green, a broad, lurid band swept up toward the zenith. Under its weird, unearthly light, the prairies, and everything upon them, took on a ghastly hue. Then came the inky-black storm-cloud--long, funnel-shaped, pendulous--and in its deafening roar and the thick darkness that could be felt, and the awful sweep of its all-engulfing embrace, the senses failed and the very breath of life seemed beaten away. The floods fell in streams, hot, then suddenly cold. And then a fusillade of hail bombarded the flat prairies, defenseless beneath the munitions of the heavens. But in all the wild, mad blackness, in the shriek and crash of maniac winds, in the swirl of many waters, and chill and fury of the threshing hail, the law of the trail failed not: "Hold fast." And with our hands gripped in one another's, we children kept the law.
Just at the moment when destruction seemed upon us, the long swinging cloud--funnel lifted. We heard it passing high above us. Then it dropped against the face of old Pawnee Rock, that must have held the trail law through all the centuries of storms that have beaten against its bold, stern front. One tremendous blast, one crashing boom, as if the foundations of the earth were broken loose, and the thing had left us far behind.
Daylight burst upon us in a moment, and the blue heavens smiled down on the clean-washed prairies. No homes, no crops, no orchards were left in ruins in those days to mark the cyclone's wrath on wilderness trails. As the darkness lifted we gathered ourselves together to take hold of life again and to defend ourselves from our human enemy.
A shower of arrows from the top of the bluff might rain upon us at any moment, yelling warriors might rush upon us, or a ring of riders encircle us. It was in times like this that I learned how quickly men can get the mastery.
Jondo and Esmond Clarenden did not delay a minute in protecting the camp and setting it in order, taking inventory of the lost and searching for the missing. Three of our number, with one of the ponies, were missing.
Aunty Boone had crouched in a protected angle at the base of the bluff, and when we found her she was calmly smoking her pipe.
"Yo' skeered of this little puff?" she queried. "Yo' bettah see a simoon on the desset, then. This here--just a racket. What's come of that little redskin?"
She was not to be found. Nor was there any trace of Rex Krane anywhere. In consternation we scanned the prairies far and wide, but only level green distances were about us, holding no sign of life. We lived hours in those watching minutes.
Suddenly Beverly gave a shout, and we saw Little Blue Flower running swiftly from the sloping side of the bluff toward the camp. Behind her stalked the young New-Englander.
"I went up to see what she was in such a hurry for to see," he explained, simply. "I calculated it would be as interestin' to me as to her, and if anything was about to cut loose"--he laid a hand carelessly on his revolver--"why, I'd help it along. The little pink pansy, it seems, went to look after our friends, the enemy," Rex went on. "The hail nearly busted that old rock open. I thought once it had. The ponies are scattered and likewise the Kiowas. Gone helter-skelter, like the--tornado. The thing hit hard up there. Some ponies dead, and mebby an Indian or two. I didn't hunt 'em up. I can't use 'em that way," he added. "So I just said, 'Pax vobiscum!' and a lot of it, and came kittering back."
Little Blue Flower's eyes glistened.
"Gone, all gone. The rain god drove them away. Now I know I may go with you. The rain god loves you."
It was to Beverly, and not to my uncle, that her eyes turned as she spoke, but he was not even listening to her. To him she was merely an Indian. She seemed more than that to me, and therein lay the difference between us.
If she had been interesting under the starlight, in the light of day she became picturesque, a beautiful type of her race, silent, alert of countenance, with big, expressive, black eyes, and long, heavy braids of black hair. With her brilliant blanket about her shoulders, a turquoise pendant on a leather band at her throat, silver bracelets on her brown arms, she was as pleasing as an Indian maiden could be--adding a touch of picturesque life to that wonderful journey westward from Pawnee Rock to Santa Fé. Aunty Boone alone resented her presence among us.
"You can trust a nigger," she growled, "'cause you know they none of 'em no 'count. But you can't tell about this Injun, whether she's good or bad. I lets that sort of fish alone."
Little Blue Flower looked up at her with steady gaze and made no reply.
Out of that morning's events I learned a lasting lesson, and I know now that the influence of Rex Krane on my life began that day, as I recalled how he had followed Aunty Boone about the dark corners of the little trading-post on the Neosho; and how he had looked at Mat Nivers once when Uncle Esmond had suggested his turning back to Independence; and how he had gone before all of us, the vanguard, to the top of the bluff west of Council Grove; and now he had followed this Indian girl. From that time I knew in my boy heart that this tall, careless Boston youth had a zealous care for the safety of women and children. How much care, events would run swiftly on to show me. But welded into my life from that hour was the meaning of a man's high, chivalric duty. And among all the lessons that the old trail taught to me, none served me more than this one that came to me on that sweet May morning beneath the shadow of Pawnee Rock.
[VI]
SPYING OUT THE LAND
City of the Holy Faith,
In thy streets so dim with age,
Do I read not Faith's decay,
But the Future's heritage.
-LILIAN WHITING.
Day was passing and the shadows were already beginning to grow purple in the valleys, long before the golden light had left the opal-crowned peaks of the Sangre-de-Christo Mountains beyond them.
On the wide crest of a rocky ridge our wagons halted. Behind us the long trail stretched back, past mountain height and cañon wall, past barren slope and rolling green prairie, on to where the wooded ravines hem in the Missouri's yellow floods.
Before us lay a level plain, edged round with high mesas, over which snowy-topped mountain peaks kept watch. A sandy plain, checkered across by verdant-banded arroyos, and splotched with little clumps of trees and little fields of corn. In the heart of it all was Santa Fé, a mere group of dust-brown adobe blocks--silent, unsmiling, expressionless--the city of the Spanish Mexican, centuries old and centuries primitive.
As our tired mules slackened their traces and drooped to rest after the long up-climb, Esmond Clarenden called out:
"Come here, children. Yonder is the end of the trail."
We gathered eagerly about him, a picture in ourselves, maybe, in an age of picturesque things; four men, bronzed and bearded; two sturdy boys; Mat Nivers, no longer a little girl, it seemed now, with the bloom of health on her tanned cheeks, and the smile of good nature in wide gray eyes; beside her, the Indian maiden, Little Blue Flower, slim, brown, lithe of motion, brief of speech; and towering back of all, the glistening black face of the big, silent African woman.
So we stood looking out toward that northwest plain where the trail lost itself among the low adobe huts huddled together beside the glistening waters of the Santa Fé River.
Rex Krane was the first to speak.
"So that's what we've come out for to see, is it?" he mused, aloud. "That's the precious old town that we've dodged Indians, and shot rattlesnakes, and sunburnt our noses, and rain-soaked our dress suits for! That's why we've pillowed our heads on the cushiony cactus and tramped through purling sands, and blistered our hands pullin' at eider-down ropes, and strained our leg-muscles goin' down, and busted our lungs comin' up, and clawed along the top edge of the world with nothin' but healthy climate between us and the bottom of the bottomless pit. Humph! That's what you call Santa Fé! 'The city of the Holy Faith!' Well, I need a darned lot of 'holy faith' to make me see any city there. It's just a bunch of old yellow brick-kilns to me, and I 'most wish now I'd stayed back at Independence and hunted dog-tooth violets along the Big Blue."
"It's not Boston, if that's what you were looking for; at least there's no Bunker Hill Monument nor Back Bay anywhere in sight. But I reckon it's the best they've got. I'm tired enough to take what's offered and keep still," Bill Banney declared.
I, too, wanted to keep still. I had only a faint memory of a real city. It must have been St. Louis, for there was a wharf, and a steamboat and a busy street, and soft voices--speaking a foreign tongue. But the pictures I had seen, and the talk I had heard, coupled with a little boy's keen imagination, had built up a very different Santa Fé in my mind. At that moment I was homesick for Fort Leavenworth, through and through homesick, for the first time since that April day when I had sat on the bluff above the Missouri River while the vision of the plains descended upon me. Everything seemed so different to-night, as if a gulf had widened between us and all the nights behind us.
We went into camp on the ridge, with the journey's goal in plain view. And as we sat down together about the fire after supper we forgot the hardships of the way over which we had come. The pine logs blazed cheerily, and as the air grew chill we drew nearer together about them as about a home fireside.
The long June twilight fell upon the landscape. The piñon and scrubby cedars turned to dark blotches on the slopes. The valley swam in a purple mist. The silence of evening was broken only by a faint bird-note in the bushes, and the fainter call of some wild thing stealing forth at nightfall from its daytime retreat. Behind us the mesas and headlands loomed up black and sullen, but far before us the Sangre-de-Christo Mountains lifted their glorified crests, with the sun's last radiance bathing them in crimson floods.
We sat in silence for a long time, for nobody cared to talk. Presently we heard Aunty Boone's low, penetrating voice inside the wagon corral:
"You pore gob of ugliness! Yo' done yo' best, and it's green corn and plenty of watah and all this grizzly-gray grass you can stuff in now. It's good for a mule to start right, same as a man. Whoo-ee!"
The low voice trailed off into weird little whoops of approval. Then the woman wandered away to the edge of the bluff and sat until late that night, looking out at the strange, entrancing New Mexican landscape.
"To-morrow we put on our best clothes and enter the city," my uncle broke the silence. "We have managed to pull through so far, and we intend to keep on pulling till we unload back at Independence again. But these are unsafe times and we are in an unsafe country. We are going to do business and get out of it again as soon as possible. I shall ask you all to be ready to leave at a minute's notice, if you are coming back with me!"
"Now you see why I didn't join the army, don't you, Krane?" Bill Banney said, aside. "I wanted to work under a real general."
Then turning to my uncle, he added:
"I'm already contracted for the round trip, Clarenden."
"You are going to start back just as if there were no dangers to be met?" Rex Krane inquired.
"As if there were dangers to be met, not run from," Esmond Clarenden replied.
"Clarenden," the young Bostonian began, "you got away from that drunken mob at Independence with your children, your mules, and your big Daniel Boone. You started out when war was ragin' on the Mexican frontier, and never stopped a minute because you had to come it alone from Council Grove. You shook yourself and family right through the teeth of that Mexican gang layin' for you back there. You took Little Trailing Arbutus at Pawnee Rock out of pure sympathy when you knew it meant a fight at sun-up, six against fifty. And there would have been a bloody one, too, but for that merciful West India hurricane bustin' up the show. You pulled us up the Arkansas River, and straddled the Gloriettas, with every danger that could ever be just whistlin' about our ears. And now you sit there and murmur softly that 'we are in an unsafe country and these are unsafe times,' so we'd better be toddlin' back home right soon. I want to tell you something now."
He paused and looked at Mat Nivers. Always he looked at Mat Nivers, who since the first blush one noonday long ago, so it seemed, now, never appeared to know or care where he looked. He must have had such a sister himself; I felt sure of that now.
"I want to tell you," Rex repeated, "that I'm goin' to stay with you. There's something safe about you. And then," he added, carelessly, as he gazed out toward the darkening plain below us, "my mother always said you could tie to a man who was good to children. And you've been good to this infant Kentuckian here."
He flung out a hand toward Bill Banney without looking away from the open West. "When you want to start back to God's country and the land of Plymouth Rocks and Pawnee Rocks, I'm ready to trot along."
"I'm glad to hear you say that, Krane," Esmond Clarenden said. "I shall need all the help I can get on the way back. Because we got through safely we cannot necessarily count on a safe return. I may need you in Santa Fé, too."
"Then command me," Rex replied.
He looked toward Mat again, but she and Little Blue Flower were coiling their long hair in fantastic fashion about their heads, and laughing like school-girls together.
Little Blue Flower was as a shy brown fawn following us. She had a way of copying Mat's manner, and she spoke less of Indian and Spanish and more of English from day to day. She had laid aside her Indian dress for one of Mat's neat gingham gowns. I think she tried hard to forget her race in everything except her prayers, for her own people had all been slain by Mexican ruffians. We could not have helped liking her if we had tried to do so. Yet that invisible race barrier that kept a fixed gulf between us and Aunty Boone separated us also from the lovable little Indian lass, albeit the gulf was far less deep and impassable.
To-night when she and Mat scampered away to the family wagon together, she seemed somehow to really belong to us.
Presently Jondo and Rex Krane and Bill and Beverly rolled their blankets about them and went to sleep, leaving Esmond Clarenden and myself alone beside the dying fire. The air was sharp and the night silence deepened as the stars came into the skies.
"Why don't you go to bed, Gail?" my uncle asked.
"I'm not sleepy. I'm homesick," I replied. "Come here, boy." He opened his arms to me, and I nestled in their embrace.
"You've grown a lot in these two months, little man," he said, softly. "You are a brave-hearted plainsman, and a good, strong little limb when it comes to endurance, but just once in a while all of us need a mothering touch. It keeps us sweet, my boy. It keeps us sweet and fit to live."
Oh, many a time in the years that followed did the loving embrace and the gentle words of this gentle, strong man come back to comfort me.
"Let me tell you something, Gail. I'm going to need a boy like you to help me a lot before we leave Santa Fé, and I shall count on you."
Just then a noise at the far side of the corral seemed to disturb the stock. A faint stir of awakening or surprise--just a hint in the air. All was still in a moment. Then it came again. We listened. Something, an indefinite something, somewhere, was astir. The surprise became unrest, anxiety, fear, among the mules.
"Wait here, Gail. I'll see what's up," Uncle Esmond said, in a low voice.
He hurried away toward the corral and I slipped back in the shadow of a rock and leaned against it to wait.
In the dim beams of a starlit New Mexican sky I could see clearly out toward the valley, but behind the camp all was darkness. As I waited, hidden by the shadows, suddenly the flap of the family-wagon cover lifted and Little Blue Flower slid out as softly as a cat walks in the dust. She was dressed in her own Indian garb now, with her bright blanket drawn picturesquely about her head and shoulders. Silently she moved about the camp, peering toward the shadows hiding me. Then with noiseless step she slipped toward where Beverly Clarenden lay, his boyish face upturned to the stars, sleeping the dreamless sleep of youth and health. I leaned forward and stared hard as the girl approached him. I saw her drop down on one knee beside him, and, bending over him, she gently kissed his forehead. She rose and gave one hurried look around the place and then, like a bird lifting its wings for flight, she threw up her arms, and in another moment she sprang to the edge of the ridge and slipped from view. I followed, only to see her gliding swiftly away, farther and farther, along the dim trail, until the shadows swallowed her from my sight.
A low whinny from the corral caught my ear, followed by a rush of horses' feet. As I slipped into my place again to wait for my uncle to return, the smoldering logs blazed out suddenly, lighting up the form of a man who appeared just beyond the fire, so that I saw the face distinctly. Then he, too, was gone, following the way the Indian girl had taken, until he lost himself in the misty dullness of the plains.
Presently Esmond Clarenden came back to the camp-fire.
"Gail, the pony we lost in that storm at Pawnee Rock has come back to us. It was standing outside the corral, waiting to get in, just as if it had lost us for a couple of hours. It is in good condition, too."
"How could it ever get here?" I exclaimed.
"Any one of a dozen ways," my uncle replied. "It may have run far that stormy morning when it broke out of the corral, and possibly some party coming over the Cimarron Trail picked it up and roved on this way. There is no telling how it got here, since it keeps still itself about the matter. Losing and finding and losing again is the law of events on the plains."
"But why should it find us right here to-night, like it had been led back?" I insisted.
"That's the miracle of it, Gail. It is always the strange thing that really happens here. In years to come, if you ever tell the truth about this trip, it will not be believed. When this isn't the frontier any longer, the story of the trail will be accounted impossible."
Everything seemed impossible to me as I sat there staring at the dying fire. Presently I remembered what I had seen while my uncle was away.
"Little Blue Flower has run away," I said, "and I saw the Mexican that came to Fort Leavenworth the day before I twisted my ankle. He slipped by here just a minute ago. I know, for I saw his face when the logs flared up."
Esmond Clarenden gave a start. "Gail, you have the most remarkable memory for faces of any child I ever knew," he said.
"Did he follow us, too, like the pony, or did he ride the pony after us?" I asked. "He's just everywhere we go, somehow. Did I ever see him before he came to the fort, or did I dream it?"
"You are a little dreamer, Gail," my uncle said, kindly. "But dreams don't hurt, if you do your part whenever you are needed."
"Bev and Bill Banney make fun of dreams," I said.
"Yes, they don't have 'em; but Bev and Bill are ready when it comes to doing things. They are a good deal alike, daring, and a bit reckless sometimes, with good hard sense enough to keep them level."
"Don't I do, too?" I inquired.
"Yes, you do and dream, both. That's all the better. But you mustn't forget, too, that sometimes the things we long for in our dreams we must fight for, and even die for, maybe, that those who come after us may be the better for our having them. What was it you said about Little Blue Flower?" Uncle Esmond had forgotten her for the moment.
"She's gone to Santa Fé, I reckon. Is she bad, Uncle Esmond? Tell me all about things," I urged.
"We are all here spying out the land, Mexican, Indian, trader, freighter, adventurer, invalid," Uncle Esmond replied. "I don't know what started the little Indian girl off, unless she just felt Indian, as Jondo would say; but I may as well tell you, Gail, that it may have been the Mexican who got our pony for us. He is a strange fellow, walks like a cat, has ears like a timber wolf, and the cunning of a fox."
"Is he our friend?" I asked, eagerly.
"Listen, boy. He came to Fort Leavenworth on purpose to bring me an important message, and he waited at Independence to see us off. Do you remember the two spies Krane talked about at Council Grove? I think he followed the Mexican spy across the river to our camp and sent him on east. Then he went back and got the crowd all mixed up by his report, while their own man scouted the trail out there for miles all night. He is the man who put you through town and decoyed the ruffians to one side. He located us after we had crossed the river, and then broke up their meeting and put the fellows off to wait till the next night. That is the way I worked out that Council Grove puzzle. He has a wide range, and there are big things ahead for him in New Mexico.
"Sooner or later however," my uncle went on, "we will have to reckon with that Kiowa tribe for stealing their captive. They meant to return her for a big ransom price.... Great Heavens, Gail! You seem like a man to me to-night instead of my little boy back at the fort. The plains bring years to us instead of months, with just one crossing. I am counting on you not to tell all you've been told and all you've seen. I can be sure of you if you can keep things to yourself. You'd better get to sleep now. There will be plenty to see over in Santa Fé. And there is always danger afoot. But remember, it is the coward who finds the most trouble in this world. Do your part with a gentleman's heart and a hero's hand, and you'll get to the end of every trail safely. Now go to bed."
Where I lay that night I could see a wide space of star-gemmed sky, the blue night-sky of the Southwest, and I wondered, as I looked up into the starry deeps, how God could keep so many bright bodies afield up there, and yet take time to guard all the wandering children of men.
With the day-dawn the strange events of the night seemed as unreal as the vanishing night-shadows. The bluest skies of a blue-sky land curved in fathomless majesty over the yellow valley of the Santa Fé. Against its borders loomed the silent mountain ranges--purple-shaddowed, silver-topped Ortiz and Jemez, Sandia and Sangre-de-Christo. Dusty and deserted lay the trail, save that here and there a group of dark-faced carriers of firewood prodded on their fagot-laden burros toward the distant town. As our wagons halted at the sandy borders of an arroyo the brown-clad form of a priest rose up from the shade of a group of scrubby piñon-trees beside the trail.
Esmond Clarenden lifted his hat in greeting.
"Are you going our way? We can give you a ride," he paused to say.
The man's face was very dark, but it was a young, strong face, and his large, dark eyes were full of the fire of life. When he spoke his voice was low and musical.
"I thank you. I go toward the mountains. You stay here long?"
"Only to dispose of my goods. My business is brief," Esmond Clarenden declared.
The good man leaned forward as if to see each face there, sweeping in everything at one glance. Then he looked down at the ground.
"These are troublesome days. War is only a temporary evil, but it makes for hate, and hate kills as it dies. Love lives and gives life." A smile lighted his eyes, though his lips were firm. "I wish you well. Among friends or enemies the one haven of safety always is the holy sanctuary."
Uncle Esmond bowed his head reverently.
"You will find it beside the trail near the river. The walls are very old and strong, but not so old as hate, nor so strong as love. A little street runs from it, crooked--six houses away. Peace be to all of you." He broke off suddenly and his last sentence was spoken in a clear, strong tone unlike the gentler voice.
"I thank you, Father!" Jondo said, as the priest passed his wagon.
The holy man gave him one swift, searching glance. Then lifting his right hand as if in blessing, and slowly dropping it until the forefinger pointed toward the west, he passed on his way.
Jondo's brown cheek flushed and the lines about his mouth grew hard.
"Take my place, Bev," he said, as he left his wagon and joined Esmond Clarenden.
The two spoke earnestly together. Then Jondo mounted Beverly's pony.
"If you need me--" I heard him say, and he turned away and rode in the direction the priest had taken.
Uncle Esmond offered no explanation for this sudden action, and his sunny face was stern.
Usually wagon-trains were spied out long before they reached the city, and a rabble attended their entry. To-day we moved along quietly until the trail became a mere walled lane. On either side one-story adobe huts sat with their backs to the street. No windows opened to the front, and only a wooden door or a closed gateway stared in blank unfriendliness at the passer-by. Little straggling lanes led off aimlessly on either side, as narrow and silent as the strange terminal of the long trail itself.
I was only a boy, with the heart of a boy and the eyes of a boy. I could only feel; I could not understand the spell of that hour. But to me everything was alluring, wrapt as it was in the mystery of a civilization old here when Plymouth Rock felt the first Pilgrim's foot, or Pawnee Rock stared at the first bold plainsman of the pale face and the conquering soul.
I was riding beside Beverly's wagon as we neared the quaint, centuries-old, adobe church of San Miguel, rising tall and silent above the low huts about it, its rough walls suggesting a fortress of strength, while its triple towers might be an outlook for a guardsman.
"Look at that church. Bev, I wonder how old it is," I exclaimed.
"I should say about a thousand years and a day," Beverly declared. "See that flopsy steeple thing! It looks like building-blocks stacked up there."
"Maybe this is the sanctuary that priest was talking about," I suggested. "He said the walls were old as hate and strong as love, with a crooked street beside it somewhere."
"Oh, you sponge! Soaking up everything you see and hear. I wonder you sleep nights for fear the wind will tell the pine trees something you'll miss," Beverly declared. "I can tell a horse's age by its teeth, but churches don't have teeth. Go and ask Mat about it. She knows when the De Sotos and Cortéses and all the other Spanish grandaddees came to Mexico."
I had just turned back alongside of Mat's wagon--she was always our book of ready reference--when a little girl suddenly dashed out of a walled lane opening into the street behind us. She stopped in the middle of the road, almost under my pony's feet, then with a shout of laughter she dashed into the deep doorway of the church and stood there, peering out at me with eyes brimful of mischief.
I brought my pony back on its haunches suddenly. I had seen this girl before. The big dark eyes, the straight little nose, the curve of the pink cheek, the china-smooth chin and neck, and, crowning all, the cloud of golden hair shading her forehead and falling in tangled curls behind.
I did not notice all these features now. It was only the eyes, dark eyes, somewhere this side of misty mountain peaks, and maybe the halo of hair that had been in my vision on that day when Beverly and Mat Nivers and I sat on the parade-ground facing a sudden turn in our life trail.
I stared at the eyes now, only half conscious that the girl was laughing at me.
"You big brown bob-cat! You look like you had slept in the Hondo 'royo all your life," she cried, and turned to run away again.
As she did so a dark face peered round the corner of the church from the crooked street beside it. A sudden gleam of white teeth and glistening eyes, a sudden leap and grip, and a boy, larger than Beverly, caught the little girl by the shoulders and shook her viciously.
She screamed and struggled. Then, with a wild shriek as he clutched at her curls, she wrenched herself away and plunged inside the church. The boy dived in after her. Another scream, and I had dropped from my pony and leaped across the road. I pushed open the door against the two struggling together. With one grip at his coat-collar I broke his hold on the little girl and flung him outside.
I have a faint recollection of a priest hurrying down the aisle toward the fighting children, as the little girl, freed from her assailant, dashed out of the door.
"He jumped at her first, and shook her and pulled her hair," I cried, as the priest caught me by the shoulder. "I'm not going to see anybody pitched into, not a little girl, anyhow."
I jerked myself free from his grasp and ran out to my pony. At the corner of the church stood the girl, her cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing defiance, her rumpled curls in a tangle about her face.
"I hate Marcos, he's so cruel, and"--her voice softened and the defiant eyes grew mischievous--"you aren't a bob-cat. You're a--Look out!"
She shouted the last words and disappeared up the narrow, crooked street, just as a fragment of rock whizzed over my shoulder. I jumped on my pony to dash away, when another rock just missed my head, and I saw the boy, Marcos, beside the church, ready for a third hurl. His black eyes flashed fire, and the grin of malice on his face showed all his fine white teeth.
I was as mad as a boy can be. Instead of fleeing, I spurred my pony straight at him.
"You little beast, I dare you to throw that rock at me! I dare you!" I cried.
The boy dropped the missile and sped away after the girl. I followed in time to see them enter a doorway, six or seven houses up the way. Then I turned back, and in a minute I had overtaken our wagons trailing down to the ford of the Santa Fé River.
"I thought mebby you'd gone back after Jondo and that holy podder," Rex Krane greeted me. "Better begin to wink naturally and look a little pleasanter now. We'll be in the Plazzer in two or three minutes."
The drivers flourished their whips, the mules caught their spirit, and with bump and lurch and rattle we swung down the narrow crack between adobe walls that ended before the old Exchange Hotel at the corner of the Plaza.
This open square in the center of the city was shaded by trees and littered with refuse. The Palace of the Governors fronted it along the entire north side, a long, low, one-story structure whose massive adobe walls defy the wearing years. Compared to the kingly palaces of my imagination, this royal dwelling seemed a very commonplace thing, and the wide portal, or veranda, that ran along its front looked like one of the sheds about the barracks at the fort rather than an entranceway for rulers. Yet this was the house of a ruler hostile to that flag to which I had thrown a good-by kiss, up at Fort Leavenworth.
On the other three sides of the Plaza were other low adobe buildings, for the business of the city faced this central square.
A crowd was gathered there when we reached it. Somebody standing before the Palace of the Governors was haranguing in fiery Spanish, if gesture and oral vehemence are true tokens.
As our wagons rumbled up to the corner of the square the crowd broke up with a shout.
"Los Americanos! Los Carros!"
The cry went up everywhere as the rabble left the speaker to flock about us--men, women, children, Mexican, Spanish, Indian, with now and then a Saxon face among them. Our outfit was as well appointed as such a journey's end permitted. We were in our best clothes--clean-shaven gentlemen, well-dressed boys, and one girl, neat and comely in a dark-blue gown of thin stuff with white lace at throat and wrist; and last, and biggest of all, Aunty Boone, in a bright-green lawn with little white dots all over it.
As I sat on my pony beside my uncle's wagon, I caught sight of the slim figure of Little Blue Flower, well back in the shade of the Plaza. She was watching Beverly, who sat in Jondo's wagon, staring at the crowd and seeing no one in particular. A minute later a tall young Indian boy stepped in front of her, and when he moved away she was gone.
Many men came forward to greet Esmond Clarenden, and there were many inquiries regarding his goods and many exclamations of surprise that he had come alone with so valuable a cargo.
It was the first time that Beverly and I had seen him among his equals. At Fort Leavenworth, where the army overruled everything else, men stood above him in authority or below him in business affairs; and while he never cringed to the one, nor patronized the other, where there are no competitors there are no true measures. That day in the Plaza of Santa Fé the merchant was in his own kingdom, where commerce stood above everything else.
Moreover, this American merchant, following a danger-girt trail, had come in fearlessly, and those men of the Plaza knew that he was one to exact value for value in all his dealings. But I believe that his real power lay in his ready smile, his courtesy, his patience, and his up-bubbling good nature that made him a friendship-builder.
Among the men who came to make acquaintance with the American trader was a Mexican merchant. Evidently he was a man of some importance, for an interpreter hastened to introduce him, explaining that this man had been away on a journey of some weeks among the mines of New Mexico and the Southwest, and only the day before he had come in from Taos.
"You will find him a prince of merchants, a sound, unprejudiced business man. His name is Felix Narveo," the American interpreter added.
The two men shook hands, greeting each other in the Spanish tongue. This Felix Narveo was well dressed and well groomed, but I recognized him at once as the Mexican of Fort Leavenworth and Independence and Council Grove.
There was one man in that company, however, who did not come forward at all. When I first caught sight of him he was looking at me. I stared back at him with a boy's curiosity, but he did not take his eyes from me until I had dropped my own. After that I watched him keenly. He seemed almost too fair for a Mexican--a tall, spare-built man with black hair, and eyes so steely blue that they were almost black. Everywhere I saw him--at the corners of the little crowd and in the thick of it. He was an easy mark, for he towered above the rest, and, being slender, he seemed to worm his way quickly from place to place. At sight of him, Aunty Boone, who had been peering out with shining eyes, drew her head in as quick as a snake, under the shadow of the wagon cover, and her eyes grew dull. He had not seen her, but I could see that he was watching the remainder of us, and especially my uncle; and I began to feel afraid of him and to wish that he would leave the Plaza. It was years ago that all this happened, and yet to-day my fear of that man still sticks in my memory.
When he turned away, suddenly I caught sight of the boy, whom I had flung out of the church, standing behind him, the boy whom the little girl had called Marcos. Although his face was dark and the man's was fair, there was a strong likeness between the two.
This Marcos stared insolently at all of us. Then with a laugh and a grimace at me, he ran after the man and they disappeared together around the corner of the Palace of the Governors. And in the rush of strange sights I forgot them both for a time.