er
happens to us, we three will stand by each other always and always,
won't we, Mat?"

He lifted his face to the girl's. Oh, Beverly! I saw him again one day
down the years, stretched out on the ground like this, lifting again a
pleading face. But that belongs--down the years.

"Yes, always and always," Mat replied, and then because she had a
Spartan spirit, she added: "But let's don't say any more that way. Let's
think of what you are going to see--the plains, the Santa Fe Trail, the
mountains, and maybe bad Indians. And even old Santa Fe town itself. You
are in for 'the big shift,' as Aunty Boone says, and you've got to be
little men and take whatever comes. It will come fast enough, you can
bet on that."

Yesterday I might have sobbed on her shoulder. I did not know then that
out on the bluff an hour ago I had come to the first turn in my
life-trail, and that I could not look back now. I did know that I
_wanted to go with Uncle Esmond._ I looked away from Mat's gray eyes,
and Beverly's head dropped on his arms, face downward--looked at nothing
but blue sky, and a graceful drooping flag; nothing but a half-sleepy,
half-active fort; nothing but the yellow April floods far up-stream,
between wooded banks tenderly gray-green in the spring sunshine. But I
did not see any of these things then. Before my eyes there stretched a
vast level prairie, with dim mountain heights beyond them. And marching
toward them westward, westward, past lurking danger, Indians here and
wild beasts there, went three men: the officer on his cavalry mount;
Jondo on his big black horse; Esmond Clarenden, neither mounted nor on
foot, it seemed, but going forward somehow. And between these three and
the misty mountain peaks there was a face--not Mat Nivers's, for the
first time in all my day-dreams--a sweet face with dark eyes looking
straight into mine. And plainly then, just as plainly as I have heard it
many times since then, came a call--the first clear bugle-note of the
child-soul--a call to service, to patriotism, and to love.

All that afternoon while Mat Nivers sang about her tasks Beverly and I
tried to play together among the elm and cottonwood trees about our
little home, but evening found us wide awake and moping. Instead of the
two tired little sleepy-heads that could barely finish supper, awake,
when night came, we lay in our trundle-bed, whispering softly to each
other and staring at the dark with tear-wet eyes--our spiritual
ba