Council Grove by the Neosho River was the end of civilization for the freighter.  Beyond it the wilderness spread its untamed lengths, and excepting Bent’s Fort far up the Arkansas River on the line of the first old trail, rarely followed now, it held not a sign of civilization for the traveler until he should reach the first outposts of the Mexican almost in the shadow of Santa Fe.  It is no wonder that wagon-trains mobilized here, waiting for an increase in numbers before they dared to start on westward.  And now there were no trains waiting for our coming.  Only a gripping necessity could have led a man like Esmond Clarenden to take the trail alone in the certain perils of the plains during the middle ’40’s.  I did not know until long afterward how brave was the loving heart that beat in that little merchant’s bosom.  A devotee of ease and refinement, he walked the prairie trails unafraid, and made the desert serve his will.

The dusk of evening had fallen long before we pitched camp that night under the big oak-trees in the Neosho River valley outside of the little trading-post.  Up in the village a light or two gleamed faintly.  From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of a violin, mingling with loud talking and boisterous laughter in a distant drinking-den.  It would be some time until moon-rise, and the shadowy places thickened to blackness.

In fair weather all of us except Mat Nivers slept in the open.  On stormy nights the younger men occupied one of the wagons, Jondo and Beverly another, and my uncle and myself the third.  Mat had the “baby-cab” as Beverly called it, with Aunty Boone underneath it.  The ground was Aunty Boone’s kingdom.  She sat upon it, ate from it, slept on it, and seemed no more soiled than a snake would be by the contact with it.

“Some day I goes plop under it, and be ground myself,” she used to say.  “Good black soil I make, too,” she always added, with her low chuckle.

To-night we were all in the wagons, for the spring rains had made the Neosho valley damp and muddy.  I was just on the edge of dreamless slumber when a low voice that seemed to cut the darkness caught my ear.

“Cla’nden!  Cla’nden!” it hissed, softly.

My uncle slipped noiselessly out to where Aunty Boone stood, her head so near to the canvas wagon-cover inside of which I lay that I could hear all that was said.

She was always a night prowler.  What other women learn now from the evening newspaper or from neighborly gossip she, being created without a sense of fear, went forth in her time and gathered at first hand.

“I been prospectin’ up ’round the saloon, Cla’nden.  They’s a nasty mess of Mexicans in town, all gettin’ drunk.”

Then I heard a faint rustle of the bushes and I knew that the woman was slipping away to her place under the wagon.  I remembered the Mexican whom I had last seen across the street from the Clarenden store in Independence.  These were bad Mexicans, as Aunty Boone had said, and that man had seemed in a silent way a friend of my uncle.  I wondered what would happen next.  It soon happened.  My uncle Esmond came inside the wagon and called, softly: