Those were happy days that followed.  Safe behind the strong walls of old Fort Bent, we children had not a care; and with the stress and strain of the trail life lifted from our young minds, we rebounded into happy childhood living.  Every day offered a new drama to our wonder-loving eyes.  We watched the big hide-press for making buffalo robes and furs into snug bales.  We climbed to the cupola of the headquarters department and saw the soldiers marching by on their way to New Mexico.  We saw the Ute and the Red River Comanche come filing in on their summer expeditions from the mountains.  We saw the trade lines from the far north bearing down to this wilderness crossroads with their early fall stock for barter.

Our playground was the court off which all the rooms opened.  And however wild and boisterous the scenes inside those walls in that summer of 1846, in four young lives no touch of evil took root.  Stronger than the six-feet width of wall, higher than the eighteen feet of adobe brick guarding us round about, was the stern strength of the young Boston man interned in the fort to protect us from within, as the strength of that structure defended us from without.

And yet he might have failed sometimes, had it not been for Aunty Boone.  Nobody trifled with her.

“You let them children be.  An give ’em the run of this shack,” she commanded of the lesser powers whose business was to domineer over the daily life there.  “The man that makes trouble wide as a needle is across is goin’ to meet me an’ the Judgment Day the same minute.”

“When Daniel gets on her crack-o’-doom voice, the mountains goin’ to skip like rams and the little hills like lambs, an’ the Army of the West won’t be necessary to protect the frontier,” Rex declared.  But he knew her worth to his cause, and he welcomed it.

And so with her brute force and his moral strength we were unconsciously intrenched in a safety zone in this far-isolated place.

With neither Uncle Esmond nor Jondo near us for the first time in our remembrance, we gained a strength in self-dependence that we needed.  For with the best of guardianship, there are many ways in which a child’s day may be harried unless the child asserts himself.  We had the years of children but the sturdy defiance of youth.  So we were happy within our own little group, and we paid little heed to the things that nobody else could forestall for us.

Outside of our family, little Charlie Bent, the half-breed child of the proprietor of the fort, was a daily plague.  He entered into all of our sports with a quickness and perseverance and wilfulness that was thoroughly American.  He took defeat of his wishes, and the equal measure of justice and punishment, with the silent doggedness of an Indian; and on the edge of babyhood he showed a spirit of revenge and malice that we, in our rollicking, affectionate lives, with all our teasing and sense of humor, could not understand; so we laughed at his anger and ignored his imperious demands.