I, too, wanted to keep still.  I had only a faint memory of a real city.  It must have been St. Louis, for there was a wharf, and a steamboat and a busy street, and soft voices—­speaking a foreign tongue.  But the pictures I had seen, and the talk I had heard, coupled with a little boy’s keen imagination, had built up a very different Santa Fe in my mind.  At that moment I was homesick for Fort Leavenworth, through and through homesick, for the first time since that April day when I had sat on the bluff above the Missouri River while the vision of the plains descended upon me.  Everything seemed so different to-night, as if a gulf had widened between us and all the nights behind us.

We went into camp on the ridge, with the journey’s goal in plain view.  And as we sat down together about the fire after supper we forgot the hardships of the way over which we had come.  The pine logs blazed cheerily, and as the air grew chill we drew nearer together about them as about a home fireside.

The long June twilight fell upon the landscape.  The pinon and scrubby cedars turned to dark blotches on the slopes.  The valley swam in a purple mist.  The silence of evening was broken only by a faint bird-note in the bushes, and the fainter call of some wild thing stealing forth at nightfall from its daytime retreat.  Behind us the mesas and headlands loomed up black and sullen, but far before us the Sangre-de-Christo Mountains lifted their glorified crests, with the sun’s last radiance bathing them in crimson floods.

We sat in silence for a long time, for nobody cared to talk.  Presently we heard Aunty Boone’s low, penetrating voice inside the wagon corral: 

“You pore gob of ugliness!  Yo’ done yo’ best, and it’s green corn and plenty of watah and all this grizzly-gray grass you can stuff in now.  It’s good for a mule to start right, same as a man.  Whoo-ee!”

The low voice trailed off into weird little whoops of approval.  Then the woman wandered away to the edge of the bluff and sat until late that night, looking out at the strange, entrancing New Mexican landscape.

“To-morrow we put on our best clothes and enter the city,” my uncle broke the silence.  “We have managed to pull through so far, and we intend to keep on pulling till we unload back at Independence again.  But these are unsafe times and we are in an unsafe country.  We are going to do business and get out of it again as soon as possible.  I shall ask you all to be ready to leave at a minute’s notice, if you are coming back with me!”

“Now you see why I didn’t join the army, don’t you, Krane?” Bill Banney said, aside.  “I wanted to work under a real general.”

Then turning to my uncle, he added: 

“I’m already contracted for the round trip, Clarenden.”

“You are going to start back just as if there were no dangers to be met?” Rex Krane inquired.

“As if there were dangers to be met, not run from,” Esmond Clarenden replied.