s heat and browning winds she never lost the pink tint no miniature
painting on ivory could exaggerate.

We stood looking at one another in the purple twilight.

"What's your name?"

"Marjory Whately. What's yours?"

"Phil Baronet, and I'm seven years old." This, a shade boastingly.

"I'm six," Marjory said. "Are you afraid of Indians?"

"No," I declared. "I won't let the Indians hurt you. Let's run a race,"
pointing toward where the Neosho lay glistening in the last light of
day, a gap in the bluff letting the reflection from great golden clouds
illumine its wave-crumpled surface.

We took hold of hands and started down the long slope together, but our
parents called us back. "Playmates already," I heard them saying.

In the gathering evening shadows we all lumbered down the slope to the
rock-bottomed ford and up into the little hamlet of Springvale.

That night when I said my prayers to Aunt Candace I cried softly on her
shoulder. "Marjie makes me homesick," I sobbed, and Aunt Candace
understood then and always afterward.

The very air about Springvale was full of tradition. The town had been
from the earliest times a landmark of the old Santa Fe trail. When the
freighters and plainsmen left the village and climbed to the top of the
slope and set their faces to the west there lay before them only the
wilderness wastes. Here Nature, grown miserly, offered not even a stick
of timber to mend a broken cart-pole in all the thousand miles between
the Neosho and the Spanish settlement of New Mexico.

Here the Indians came with their furs and beaded garments to exchange
for firearms and fire-water. People fastened their doors at night for a
purpose. No curfew bell was needed to call in the children. The wooded
Neosho Valley grew dark before the evening lights had left the prairies
beyond the west bluff, and the waters that sang all day a song of cheer
as they rippled over the rocky river bed seemed always after nightfall
to gurgle murderously as they went their way down the black-shadowed
valley.

The main street was as broad as an Eastern boulevard. Space counted for
nothing in planning towns in a land made up of distances. At the end of
this street stood the "Last Chance" general store, the outpost of
civilization. What the freighter failed to get here he would do without
until he stood inside the brown adobe walls of the old city of Santa Fe.
Tell Mapleson, the proprietor of the "Last Chance," was a tall, slig