They sat outside in the warm early evening, the young man and Prudence near each other at one side of the door, while Joel Rae resumed his chair a dozen feet the other side and lapsed into silence.  The two young people fell easily into talk as on the other evenings they had spent there.  Yet presently she was again aware, as in the moment of his greeting, that he laboured under some constraint.  He was uneasy and shifted his chair several times until at length it was so placed that he could look beyond her to where her father had tilted his own chair against the house and sat huddled with his chin on his breast.  He talked absently, too, at first, of many things and without sequence; and when he looked at her, there was something back of his eyes, plain even 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