Grand Canon--you looked into my eyes again and I knew my life
dream had come true."

I rose and, bending over my wife's cloud of beautiful silvery hair, I
kissed her gently on each fair cheek.

"Gail, why not take the old trail for our golden-wedding anniversary--a
long journey, clear to the mountains?" Eloise suggested.

"There is no trail now; only its ghost haunting the way," I replied,
"but, Little Lees, I don't believe that we who look back on so many
happy years, after the stormy ones of early life, could find any other
path half so dear to us as that long path we knew in childhood and early
youth, and the one we followed together in our first years of mature
womanhood and manhood."

And so we did not celebrate one October day with all of our children and
grandchildren and friends coming to offer us gold coins, gold-headed
canes--which I do not use--and gold-rimmed glasses for eyes that see
farther and clearer than my spectacled grandsons at the university can
see to-day. We made a golden summer of the thing and followed where,
like a will-o'-the-wisp of memory, the Santa Fe Trail of threescore
years ago reached from the raw frontier at Independence on to the
Missouri bluffs, clear to the sunny valley of the Holy Faith.

Only a headstone at long intervals shows the way now--a stone that well
might read:

Here ran the old Santa Fe Trail. This stone, set here, is sacred to
the memory of the Vanguards of the Plains who followed it.

They stand, these "markers" now, on hilltops and in deep valleys; by
country crossroads and where main streets cut each other in the towns
and villages. They ornament the city parks, they show where splendid
concrete bridges, re-enforced with structural steel, span streams that
once the ox-teams doubled and trebled strength to ford. They gleam where
corn grows tall and black on fertile prairies; where seas of wheat have
flooded barren, burning plains, and perfumey alfalfa sweetens the air
above what was once grassless desolation. They whisper of a day gone by
among the silent mountains, where tunnels let the iron trail run easily
under the old trail's dizzy path. They nestle in the shadows of
gray-green cliffs and by red mesa heights; until the last monument,
sacred to the memory of a day forgotten, speaks at the corner of the old
Plaza in the heart of Santa Fe.

That was a journey long to be remembered--the long, golden-wedding
journey of Gail Clarenden with his wife,