Ferdinand Ramero dropped to a seat beside Father Josef.

“I have told you I cannot face that man.  I will stay here now,” he said, in a low voice to the priest.  “But I do not stay here always, and I can send where I do not follow,” he added, defiantly.

Esmond Clarenden was already on his horse with his little charge, snugly wrapped, in his arms.

Father Josef at the portal lifted his hand in sign of blessing.

“Peace be with you.  Do not tarry long,” he said.  Then, turning to Jondo, he gazed into the strong, handsome face.  “Go in peace.  He will not follow.  But forget not to love even your enemies.”

In the midnight dimness Jondo’s bright smile glowed with all its courageous sweetness.

“I finished that fight long ago,” he said.  “I come only to help others.”

Long these two, priest and plainsman, stood there with clasped hands, the gray night mists of the Santa Fe Valley round about them and all the far stars of the midnight sky gleaming above them.

Then Jondo mounted his horse and rode away up the trail toward Santa Fe.

VIII

THE WILDERNESS CROSSROADS

  I will even make a way in the wilderness. 
                              —­ISAIAH.

Bent’s fort stood alone in the wide wastes of the upper Arkansas valley.  From the Atlantic to the Pacific shores there was in America no more isolated spot holding a man’s home.  Out on the north bank of the Arkansas, in a grassy river bottom, with rolling treeless plains rippling away on every hand, it reared its high yellow walls in solitary defiance, mute token of the white man’s conquering hand in a savage wilderness.  It was a great rectangle built of adobe brick with walls six feet through at the base, sloping to only a third of that width at the top, eighteen feet from the ground.  Round bastions, thirty feet high, at two diagonal corners, gave outlook and defense.  Immense wooden doors guarded a wide gateway looking eastward down the Arkansas River.  The interior arrangement was after the Mexican custom of building, with rooms along the outer walls all opening into a big patio, or open court.  A cross-wall separated this court from the large corral inside the outer walls at the rear.  A portal, or porch, roofed with thatch on cedar poles, ran around the entire inner rectangle, sheltering the rooms somewhat from the glare of the white-washed court.  A little world in itself was this Bent’s Fort, a self-dependent community in the solitary places.  The presiding genius of this community was William Bent, whose name is graven hard and deep in the annals of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountain country in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century.