in
the dusk, that she had not seen there before. He was no longer the
ingenuous youth who had come to them from off the Kanab trail.

In a little while, however, this uneasiness seemed to vanish and he was
speaking naturally again, telling of his life on the plains with a
boyish enthusiasm; first of the cattle drives, of the stampede of a herd
by night, when the Indians would ride rapidly by in the dark, dragging a
buffalo-robe over the ground at the end of a lariat, sending the
frightened steers off in a mad gallop that made the earth tremble. They
would have to ride out at full speed in the black night, over ground
treacherous with prairie-dog holes, to head and turn the herd of
frenzied cattle, and by riding around and around them many times get
them at last into a circle and so hold them until they became quiet
again. Often this was not until sunrise, even with the lullabys they
sang "to put them to sleep."

Then he spoke of adventures with the Indians while freighting over the
Santa Fe trail, and of what a fine man his father, Ezra Calkins, was. It
was the first time he had mentioned the name and her ear caught it at
once.

"Your father's name is Calkins?"

"Yes--I'm only an adopted son."

Unconsciously she had been letting her voice fall low, making their chat
more confidential. She awoke to this now and to the fact that he had
done the same, by noting that he raised his voice at this time with a
casual glance past her to where her father sat.

"Yes--you see my own father and mother were killed when I was eight
years old, and the people that murdered them tried to kill me too, but I
was a spry little tike and give them the slip. It was a bad country, and
I like to have died, only there was a band of Navajos out trading
ponies, and one morning, after I'd been alone all night, they picked me
up and took care of me. I was pretty near gone, what with being scared
and everything, but they nursed me careful. They took me away off to the
south and kept me about a year, and then one time they took me with them
when they worked up north on a buffalo hunt. It was at Walnut Creek on
the big bend of the Arkansas that they met Ezra Calkins coming along
with one of his trains and he bought me of those Navajos. I remember he
gave fifty silver dollars for me to the chief. Well, when I told him all
that I could remember about myself--of course the people that did the
killing scared a good deal of it out of me--he took me to