Esmond Clarenden spoke reminiscently, and I stared at him in surprise until suddenly I remembered that Jondo had said, “We were all in love with Mary Marchland.”  Eloise must seem to him and Jondo like the Mary Marchland they had known in their young manhood.  But my uncle’s mood passed quickly, and his face was very grave as he said: 

“The conditions out on the frontier are serious in every way right now.  The Indians are on the war-path, leaving destruction wherever they set foot.  Something must be done to protect the wagon-trains on the Santa Fe Trail.  I have already lost part of two valuable loads this season, and Narveo has lost three.  But the appalling loss of property is nothing compared to the terror and torture to human life.  The settlers on the frontier claims are being massacred daily.  The Governor of Kansas is doing all he can to get some action from the army leaders at Washington.  But you haven’t been in military service for six years without finding out that some army leaders are flesh and blood, and some are only wood—­plain wooden wood.  Meantime, the story of one butchery doesn’t get to the Missouri River before the story of another catches up with it.  It’s bad enough when it’s ruinous to just my own commercial business—­but in cases like this, humanity is my business.”

What a man he was—­that Esmond Clarenden!  They still say of him in Kansas City that no sounder financier and no bigger-hearted humanitarian ever walked the streets of that “Gateway to the Southwest” than the brave little merchant-plainsman who builded for the generations that should follow him.

“What will be the outcome, Uncle Esmond?  Are we to lose all we have gained out here?” I asked.

“Not if we are real Westerners.  It’s got to be stopped.  The question is, how soon,” my uncle replied.

That night in a half-waking dream I remembered Aunty Boone’s prophetic greeting a few days before, and how her eyes had narrowed and grown dull as she said, “One more stainin’ of your hands ’fore you are through.”

I had given six good years to army service—­the years which young men give to college and to establishing themselves in their life-work.  But the vision of the three men whom I had seen under the elm-tree at Fort Leavenworth came back to me, and only one—­the cavalry man—­moved westward now.  I knew that I was dreaming, but I did not want to waken till the vision of a fair face whose eyes looked into mine should come to make my dream sweet and restful.

But in my waking hours, in spite of the gravity of conditions that troubled Esmond Clarenden, in spite of the terrible tidings of daily killings on the unprotected plains, I forgot everything except the girl beside me as I went with her and Mat and the children to the new home in the village of Burlingame beside the Santa Fe Trail.