Eloise St. Vrain had come up to Kansas to let the green prairies shut out the memory of tall red mesas.  About the little town of Burlingame the prairies were waiting for her eyes to see.  It nestled beside a deep creek under the shelter of forest trees, with the green prairie lapping up to its edges on every side.  The trail wound round the shoulder of a low hill, and, crossing the stream, it made the main street of the town, then wandered on westward to where a rim of ground shut the view of its way from the settlement under the trees by the creek.  A stanch little settlement it was, and, like many Kansas towns of the ’60’s, with big, but never-to-be realized, ambition to become a city.  Into its life and up-building Rex Krane was to throw his good-natured Yankee shrewdness, and Mat her calm, generous spirit; vanguards they were, among the home-makers of a great State.

My stay in the place was brief, and I saw little of Eloise until the evening before I was to return to Kansas City.  I had meant to go away, as she had left me in the San Christobal Valley, without one backward look, but I couldn’t do it; and at the close of my last day I went to the Krane home, where I found her alone.  It was the long after-sunset hour, with the refreshing evening breezes pouring in from all the green levels about us.

“Rex is at the store, and the others are all gone fishing,” Eloise said, in answer to my inquiry for the family.

“Mat and Bev always did go fishing on every occasion that I can remember, and they will make fishermen of little Esmond and Rex now.  Would you like to go up to the west side of town and look into New Mexico?” I asked, wondering why Beverly should go fishing with Mat when Eloise was waiting for his smile.

But I was desperately lonely to-night, and I might not see Eloise again until after she and Beverly—­I could not go farther.  She smiled and said, lightly: 

“I’m just honin’ for a walk, as Aunty Boone would say, but I’m not quite ready to see New Mexico yet.”

“Oh, it’s only a thing made of evening mists rising from the meadows, and bits of sunset lights left over when the day was finished,” I assured her.

So we left the shadow of the tall elms and strolled up the main street toward the west.

Where the one cross-street cut the trail in the center of the village there was a public well.  The ground around it was trampled into mud by many hoofs.  A Mexican train had just come in and was grouped about this well, drinking eagerly.

“What news of the plains?” I asked their leader as we passed.

“I cannot tell you with the lady here,” he replied, bowing courteously.  “It is too awful.  A spear hung with a scalp of pretty baby hair like hers.  I see it yet.  The plains are all alive—­alive with hostile red men; and the worst one of all—­he that had the golden scalp—­is but a half-breed Cheyenne Dog.  Never the Apaches were so bad as he.”