e 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 Fe 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 Fe 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