I looked away along the winding valley of the Smoky Hill.  I must hear it some time.  Why be a coward now?

“Say on, I’m always ready to hear anything from you, Beverly.”

I tried to speak firmly, and I hoped my voice did not seem faltering to him.  He sat silent a long while.  Then he rose and straightened to his full height—­a splendid form of strength and wholesomeness and grace.

“I’ll tell you some time soon, but not to-night.  Honor is something with me yet.”

And so he left me.

I dreamed of him that night with Eloise.  And all of us were glad.  I wakened suddenly.  Beverly was standing near me.  He turned and walked away, his upright form and gait, even in the faint light, individually Bev’s own.  I saw him lie down and draw his blanket about him, then sit up a moment, then nestle down again.  Something went wrong with sleep and me for a long time, and once I called out, softly: 

“Bev, can’t you sleep?”

“Oh, shut up!  Not if you fidget about me,” he replied, with the old happy-go-lucky toss of the head and careless tone.

It was dim dawn when I wakened.  My cousin was sleeping calmly just a few feet away.  An irresistible longing to speak to him overcame me and I slipped across and gently kicked the slumbering form.  Two cavalry blankets rolled apart.  A note pinned to the edge of one caught my eye.  I stooped to read: 

DEAR GAIL, Don’t hate me.  I’m sick of army life.  They will call me a coward and if they get me they will shoot me for a deserter.  I have disgraced the Clarenden name.  You’ll never see me again.  Good-bye, old boy.

     BEV.

Deserter!

The yells of all the tribes in the battle on the Prairie Dog Creek shrieked not so fiercely in my ears as that word rang now.  And all the valley of the Smoky Hill echoed and re-echoed it.

Deserter!

My Beverly—­who never told a lie, nor feared a danger, nor ever, except in self-defense, hurt a creature God had made.  I could bury Bev, or stand beside him on his wedding-day.  But Beverly disgraced!  O, God of mercy toward all cowards, pity him!

I sat down beside the blankets I had kicked apart and looked back over my cousin’s life.  It offered me no help.  I thought of Eloise—­and his longing to see her on the night before; of his struggle to tell me something.  I knew now what that something was.  Poor boy!

He was not a boy, he was a man—­strong, fearless, happy-hearted.  How could the plains make cowards out of such as he?  They had made a man of Jondo, who had all excuse to play the coward.  The mystery of the human mind is a riddle past my reading—­and I had always thought of Beverly’s as an open book.  The only one to whom I could turn now was not Eloise, nor my uncle, nor Mat nor Rex, but Jondo, John Doe, the nameless man, with whom Esmond Clarenden had walked all these years and for whose sake he had rescued Eloise St. Vrain.  They had “toted together,” as Aunty Boone had said.  Oh, Aunty Boone with dull eyes of prophecy!  I could hear her soft voice saying: