Hither in the middle ’40’s the wild trails of the West converged:  northward, from the trading-posts of Bent and St. Vrain on the Platte; south, over the Raton Pass from Taos and Santa Fe; westward, from the fur-bearing plateaus of the Rockies, where trappers and traders brought their precious piles of pelts down the Arkansas; and eastward, half a thousand miles from the Missouri River frontier—­the pathways of a restless, roving people crossed each other here.  And it was toward this wilderness crossroads that Esmond Clarenden directed his course in that summertime of my boyhood years.

The heat of a July sun beat pitilessly down on the scorching plains.  The weary trail stretched endlessly on toward a somewhere in the yellow distance that meant shelter and safety.  Spiral gusts of air gathering out of the low hills to the southeast picked up great cones of dust and whirled them zigzagging across the brown barren face of the land.  Every draw was bone dry; even the greener growths along their sheltered sides, where the last moisture hides itself, wore a sickly sallow hue.

Under the burden of this sun-glare, and through these stifling dust-cones, our little company struggled sturdily forward.

We had left Santa Fe as suddenly and daringly as we had entered it, the very impossibility of risking such a journey again being our, greatest safeguard.  Esmond Clarenden was doing the thing that couldn’t be done, and doing it quickly.

In the gray dawn after that midnight ride to Agua Fria a little Indian girl had slipped like a brown shadow across the Plaza.  Stopping at the door of the Exchange Hotel, she leaned against the low slab of petrified wood that for many a year served as a loafer’s roost before the hotel doorway.  Inside the building Jondo caught the clear twitter of a bird’s song at daybreak, twice repeated.  A pause, and then it came again, fainter this time, as if the bird were fluttering away through the Plaza treetops.

In that pause, the gate in the wall had opened softly, and Aunty Boone’s sharp eyes peered through the crack.  The girl caught one glimpse of the black face, then, dropping a tiny leather bag beside the stone, she sped away.

A tall young Indian boy, prone on the ground behind a pile of refuse in the shadowy Plaza, lifted his head in time to see the girl glide along the portal of the Palace of the Governors and disappear at the corner of the structure.  Then he rose and followed her with silent moccasined feet.

And Jondo, who had hurried to the hotel door, saw only the lithe form of an Indian boy across the Plaza.  Then his eye fell on the slender bag beside the stone slab.  It held a tiny scrap of paper, bearing a message: 

Take long trail QUICK.  Mexicans follow far.  Trust bearer anywhere.  JOSEF.

An hour later we were on our way toward the open prairies and the Stars and Stripes afloat above Fort Leavenworth.