to the west, even in their silence, seemed like
sentient things, loving us, as we loved them.

We children had gone all over the place before sunrise and touched
everything, in token of good-by; from some instinct tarrying longest at
the flagpole, where we threw kisses to the great, beautiful banner high
above us. Now, at the moment of leaving all these familiar things of all
our years, a choking pain came to our throats. Mat's eyes filled with
tears and she looked resolutely forward. Beverly and I clutched hands
and shut our teeth together, determined to overcome this home-grip on
our hearts. Aunty Boone sat in a corner of the deck as the boat swung
out into the stream, her eyes dull and unseeing. She never spoke of her
thoughts, but I have wondered often, since that big day of my young
years, if she might not have recalled other voyages: the slave-ship
putting out to sea with the African shores fading behind her; and the
big river steamer at the New Orleans dock where brutal hands had hurled
her from the deck into the dangerous floods of the Mississippi. This was
her third voyage, a brief run from Fort Leavenworth to Independence. She
was apart from her fellow-passengers as in the other two, but now nobody
gave her a curse, nor a blow.

III

THE WIDENING HORIZON

Whose furthest footsteps never strayed
Beyond the village of his birth,
Is but a lodger for the night
In this old Wayside Inn of Earth.

The broad green prairies of the West roll back in huge billows from the
Missouri bluffs, and ripple gently on, to melt at last into the level
grassy plains sloping away to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Up
and down these land-waves, and across these ripples, the old Santa Fe
Trail, the slender pathway of a wilderness-bridging commerce, led out
toward the great Southwest--a thousand weary miles--to end at last,
where the narrow thoroughfare reached the primitive hostelry at the
corner of the plaza in the heart of the capital of a Spanish-Mexican
demesne.

It was a strange old highway, tying the western frontier of a new,
self-reliant American civilization to the eastern limit of an autocratic
European offshoot, grafted upon an ancient Indian stock of the Western
Hemisphere. In language, nationality, social code, political faith, and
prevailing spiritual creed, the terminals of this highway were as
unlike as their geographical naming. For the trail began at
_Independence_, in Missouri, and