At last a horseman, coming suddenly from somewhere, rode swiftly by each shadow-hidden wagon, half pausing at the sound of the mules stamping in their places, and then he hurried up the street.

“Three against the crowd.  If we must fight, fight to kill,” Jondo urged, as the ready firearms were placed for action.

In a minute or two the crew broke out of the saloon and filled the moonlit street, all talking and swearing in broken Spanish.

“Not come yet!”

“Pedro say they be here to-morrow night!” “We wait till to-morrow night!”

And with many wild yells they fell back for a last debauch in the drinking-den.

“I don’t understand it,” Jondo declared.  “That fellow who rode by here ought to have located every son of us, but if they want to wait till to-morrow night it suits me.”

An hour later, when the village was in a dead sleep, three wagons slowly pulled up the long street and joined the waiting group at the top, and the crossing over was complete.

Dawn was breaking as our four wagons, followed by the ponies, crept away in the misty light.  As we trailed off into the unknown land, I looked back at the bluff below which nestled the last houses we were to see for seven hundred miles.  And there, outlined against the horizon, a Mexican stood watching us.  I had seen the same man one day riding up from the ravine southwest of Fort Leavenworth.  I had seen him dashing toward the river the next day.  I had watched him sitting across the street from the Clarenden store in Independence.

I wondered if it might have been this man who had hung about our camp the evening before, and if it might have been this same man who rode between us and the saloon mob, leading the crowd after him and losing us on the side of the bluff.  And as we had eluded the Council Grove danger, I wondered what would come next, and if he would be in it.

V

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

“So I draw the world together, link by link.” 
—­KIPLING.

Day after day we pushed into the unknown wilderness.  No wagon-trains passed ours moving eastward.  No moccasined track in the dust of the trail gave hint of any human presence near.  Where to-day the Pullman car glides in smooth comfort, the old Santa Fe Trail lay like a narrow brown ribbon on the green desolation of Nature’s unconquered domain.  Out beyond the region of long-stemmed grasses, into the short-grass land, we pressed across a pathless field-of-the-cloth-of-green, gemmed with myriads of bright blossoms—­broad acres on acres that the young years of a coming century should change into great wheat-fields to help fill the granaries of the world.  How I reveled in it—­that far-stretching plain of flower-starred verdure!  It was my world—­mine, unending, only softening out into lavender mists that rimmed it round in one unbroken fold of velvety vapor.