“Good-by.  I thank you a thousand times,” I said, saluting him.

“And I thank you.  A chain, you know, is as strong as its weakest link.  A cavalry troop is as able as its soldiers make it.”

He turned his horse about, and I rode off alone across the lonely plains a hundred miles away toward old Fort Dodge, beside the Arkansas River.  Jondo and Rex were to meet me there for one more trip on the long Santa Fe Trail.

Late September rains had blessed the valley of the Arkansas.  The level land about Fort Dodge showed vividly green against the yellow sand-hills across the river, and the brown, barren bluffs westward, where a little city would one day rise in pretty picturesqueness.  The scene was like the Garden of Eden to my eyes when I broke through the rough ridges to the north on the last lap of my long ride thither and hurried down to the fort.  I grant I did not appear like one who had a right to enter Eden, for I was as brown as a Malayan.  Nearly four months of hard riding, sleeping on the ground, with a sky-cover, eating buffalo meat, and drinking the dregs of slow-drying pools, had made a plainsman of me, of the breed that long since disappeared.  Golf-sticks and automobile steering-wheels are held by hands to-day no less courageous than those that swung the carbine into place, and flung aside the cavalry bridle-rein in a wild onslaught in our epic day.  Each age grows men, flanked by the coward and the reckless daredevil.

Rex Krane was first to recognize me when I reached the fort.

“Oh, we are all here but Mat:  Clarenden, Jondo, Aunty Boone, and Little Lees; and a squad of half a dozen cavalry men are ready to go with us.”  Rex drawled in his old Yankee fashion, hiding an aching heart underneath his jovial greeting.

“All of us!” I exclaimed.

“Yes.  Here they all come!” Rex retorted.

They all came, but I saw only one, veiling the joy in my eyes as best I could.  For with the face of Eloise before me, I knew the hardest battle of my life was calling me to colors.  I had forgotten how womanly she was, or else her summer by the blessed prairies that lap up to the edge of the quiet town of Burlingame had brought her peace and helped her to put away sad memories of her mother.

Behind her—­a black background for her fair, golden head—­was Aunty Boone.

“Our girl was called to Santa Fe, and Daniel here goes with her.  I couldn’t stay behind, of course,” my uncle said.  “The Comanches are making trouble all along the Cimarron, and we will go up the Arkansas by the old trail route.  It is farther, but the soldiers say much safer right now, and maybe just as quick for us.  There is no load of freight to hinder us—­two wagons and our mounts.  Besides, the cavalrymen have some matters to look after near the mountains, or we might not have had their protection granted us.”

The beauty of that early autumn on the plains and mountains lingers in my memory still, though half a century has passed since that journey on the old, long trail to Santa Fe.