Beverly should go fishing with Mat when
Eloise was waiting for his smile.

But I was desperately lonely to-night, and I might not see Eloise again
until after she and Beverly--I could not go farther. She smiled and
said, lightly:

"I'm just honin' for a walk, as Aunty Boone would say, but I'm not quite
ready to see New Mexico yet."

"Oh, it's only a thing made of evening mists rising from the meadows,
and bits of sunset lights left over when the day was finished," I
assured her.

So we left the shadow of the tall elms and strolled up the main street
toward the west.

Where the one cross-street cut the trail in the center of the village
there was a public well. The ground around it was trampled into mud by
many hoofs. A Mexican train had just come in and was grouped about this
well, drinking eagerly.

"What news of the plains?" I asked their leader as we passed.

"I cannot tell you with the lady here," he replied, bowing courteously.
"It is too awful. A spear hung with a scalp of pretty baby hair like
hers. I see it yet. The plains are all _alive--alive_ with hostile red
men; and the worst one of all--he that had the golden scalp--is but a
half-breed Cheyenne Dog. Never the Apaches were so bad as he."

The cattle horned about the well, with their drivers shouting and
struggling to direct them, as we went wide to avoid the mud, then passed
up to the rise beyond which lay the old trail's westward route.

The mists were rising from the lowlands; along the creek the sunset sky
was all a flaming glory, under whose deep splendor the June prairies lay
tenderly green and still; down in the village the sounds of the Mexicans
settling into camp; the shouting of children, romping late; and out
across the levels, the mooing call of milking-time from some far-away
settler's barn-yard; a robin singing a twilight song in the elms;
crickets chirping in the long grass; and the gentle evening breeze sweet
and cool out of the west--such was the setting for us two. We paused on
the crest of the ridge and sat down to watch the afterglow of a prairie
twilight. We did not speak for a long time, but when our eyes met I knew
the hour had been made for me. In such an hour we had sat beside the
glistening Flat Rock down in the Neosho Valley. I was a whole-hearted
boy when I went down there, full of eagerness for the life of adventure
on the trail, and she a girl just leaving boarding-school. And now--life
sweetens so with years.

"I