The cattle horned about the well, with their drivers shouting and struggling to direct them, as we went wide to avoid the mud, then passed up to the rise beyond which lay the old trail’s westward route.

The mists were rising from the lowlands; along the creek the sunset sky was all a flaming glory, under whose deep splendor the June prairies lay tenderly green and still; down in the village the sounds of the Mexicans settling into camp; the shouting of children, romping late; and out across the levels, the mooing call of milking-time from some far-away settler’s barn-yard; a robin singing a twilight song in the elms; crickets chirping in the long grass; and the gentle evening breeze sweet and cool out of the west—­such was the setting for us two.  We paused on the crest of the ridge and sat down to watch the afterglow of a prairie twilight.  We did not speak for a long time, but when our eyes met I knew the hour had been made for me.  In such an hour we had sat beside the glistening Flat Rock down in the Neosho Valley.  I was a whole-hearted boy when I went down there, full of eagerness for the life of adventure on the trail, and she a girl just leaving boarding-school.  And now—­life sweetens so with years.

“I think I can understand why your uncle thought it would be well for me to come to Kansas,” Eloise said at last.  “There is an inspiration and soothing restfulness in a thing like this.  Our mountains are so huge and tragical; and even their silences are not always gentle.  And our plains are dry and gray.  And yet I love the valley of the Santa Fe, and the old Ortiz and Sandia peaks, and the red sunset’s stain on the Sangre-de-Christo.  Many a time I have lifted up my eyes to them for help, as the shepherd did to his Judean hills when he sang his psalms of hope and victory.”

“Yes, Nature is kind to us if we will let her be.  Jondo told me that long ago, and I’ve proved it since.  But I have always loved the prairies.  And this ridge here belongs to me,” I replied.

Eloise looked up inquiringly.

“I’ll tell you why.  When I was a little boy, years ago, a day-dreaming, eager-hearted little boy, we camped here one night.  That was my first trip over the trail to Santa Fe.  You haven’t forgotten it and what a big brown bob-cat I looked like when I got there.  I grew like weeds in a Kansas corn-field on that trip.”

“Oh, I remember you.  Go on,” Eloise said, laughingly.

“That night after supper, everybody had left camp—­Mat and Bev were fishing—­and I was alone and lonely, so I came up here to find what I could see of the next day’s trail.  It was such an hour as this.  And as I watched the twilight color deepen, my own horizon widened, and I think the soul of a man began, in that hour, to look out through the little boy’s eyes; and a new mile-stone was set here to make a landmark in my life-trail.  The boy who went back slowly to the camp that night was not the same little boy that had run up here to spy out the way of the next day’s journey.”