The yellow Missouri boiled endlessly along by the foot of the bluff.  The flag flapped broadly in the strong breeze that blew in from the west; the square log house—­the only home we had ever known—­looked forlornly after us, with its two front windows with blinds half drawn, like two half-closed, watching eyes; the cottonwoods and elms, the tiny storehouse—­everything—­grew suddenly very dear to us.  The fort buildings throwing long shadows in the early morning, the level-topped forests east of the Missouri River, and the budding woodland that overdraped the ravines to the west, even in their silence, seemed like sentient things, loving us, as we loved them.

We children had gone all over the place before sunrise and touched everything, in token of good-by; from some instinct tarrying longest at the flagpole, where we threw kisses to the great, beautiful banner high above us.  Now, at the moment of leaving all these familiar things of all our years, a choking pain came to our throats.  Mat’s eyes filled with tears and she looked resolutely forward.  Beverly and I clutched hands and shut our teeth together, determined to overcome this home-grip on our hearts.  Aunty Boone sat in a corner of the deck as the boat swung out into the stream, her eyes dull and unseeing.  She never spoke of her thoughts, but I have wondered often, since that big day of my young years, if she might not have recalled other voyages:  the slave-ship putting out to sea with the African shores fading behind her; and the big river steamer at the New Orleans dock where brutal hands had hurled her from the deck into the dangerous floods of the Mississippi.  This was her third voyage, a brief run from Fort Leavenworth to Independence.  She was apart from her fellow-passengers as in the other two, but now nobody gave her a curse, nor a blow.

III

THE WIDENING HORIZON

  Whose furthest footsteps never strayed
    Beyond the village of his birth,
  Is but a lodger for the night
    In this old Wayside Inn of Earth.

The broad green prairies of the West roll back in huge billows from the Missouri bluffs, and ripple gently on, to melt at last into the level grassy plains sloping away to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Up and down these land-waves, and across these ripples, the old Santa Fe Trail, the slender pathway of a wilderness-bridging commerce, led out toward the great Southwest—­a thousand weary miles—­to end at last, where the narrow thoroughfare reached the primitive hostelry at the corner of the plaza in the heart of the capital of a Spanish-Mexican demesne.

It was a strange old highway, tying the western frontier of a new, self-reliant American civilization to the eastern limit of an autocratic European offshoot, grafted upon an ancient Indian stock of the Western Hemisphere.  In language, nationality, social code, political faith, and prevailing spiritual creed, the terminals of this highway were as unlike as their geographical naming.  For the trail began at Independence, in Missouri, and ended at Santa Fe, the “City of the Holy Faith,” in New Mexico.