Where the great stream bends to the east, the rugged heights about its elbow, Aunty Boone, in those days, was wont to declare, did not offer enough level ground to set a hen on.  Small reason was there then to hope that a city, great and gracious, would one day cover those rough ravines and grace those slopes and hilltops in the angle between the Missouri and the Kaw.

Aunty Boone had resented leaving Fort Leavenworth when the Clarenden business made the young city at the Kaw’s mouth more desirable for a home.  But Esmond Clarenden foresaw that a military post, when the protection it offers is no longer needed, will not, in itself, be a city-builder.  The war had brought New Mexico into United States territory; railroads were slowly creeping westward toward the Mississippi River; steamboats and big covered wagons were bringing settlers into Kansas, where little cabins were beginning to mark the landscape with new hearth-stones.  Congress was wrangling over the great slavery question.  The Eastern lawmakers were stupidly opposing the efforts of Missouri statesmen to extend mail routes westward, or to spend any energy toward developing that so-called worthless region which they named “the great American desert.”  And the old Santa Fe Trail was now more than ever the highway for the commerical treasures of the Rocky Mountains and the great Southwest.

It was the time of budding things.  In the valley of the Missouri the black elm boughs, the silvery sycamores and cottonwoods, and the vines on the gray rock-faced cliffs were veiled in shimmering draperies of green, with here and there a little group of orchard trees faintly pink against the landscape’s dainty verdure.

Beverly Clarenden and I stood on the deck of a river steamer as it made the wharf at old Westport Landing, where Esmond Clarenden waited for us.  And long before the steamer’s final bump against the pier we had noted the tall, slender girl standing beside him.  We had been away three years, the only schooling outside of Uncle Esmond’s teaching we were ever to have.  We were big boys now, greatly conscious of hands and feet in our way, “razor broke,” Aunty Boone declared, brimful of hilarity and love of adventure, and eager for the plains life, and the dangers of the old trail by which we were to conquer or be conquered.  In the society of women we were timid and ill at ease.  Aside from this we were self-conceited, for we knew more of the world and felt ourselves more important on that spring morning than we ever presumed to know or dared to feel in all the years that followed.

“Who is she, Gail, that tall one by little fat Uncle Esmond?” Beverly questioned, as we neared the wharf.

“You don’t reckon he’s married, Bev?  He’s all of twenty-four or five years older than we are, and we aren’t calves any more.”  I replied, scanning the group on the wharf.