“I don’t know about Mat having her wish,” he said, thoughtfully, “but never mind.  Trade is booming and I’m needing help on the trail this spring.  Jondo starts west in two weeks.”

Beverly and I sprang up.  Six feet of height, muscular, adventure-loving, fearless, we had been made to order for the Santa Fe Trail.  And if I was still a dreamer and caught sometimes the finer side of ideals, where Beverly Clarenden saw only the matter-of-fact, visible things, no shrewder, braver, truer plainsman ever walked the long distances of the old Santa Fe Trail than this boy with his bright face and happy-go-lucky spirit unpained by dreams, untrammeled by fancies.

“Two weeks!  We are ready to start right after supper,” we declared.

“Oh, I have other matters first,” Uncle Esmond said.  “Beverly, you must go up to Fort Leavenworth and arrange a lot of things with Banney for this trip.  He’s to go, too, because military escort is short this season.”

“Suits me!” Beverly declared.  “Old Bill Banney and I always could get along together.  And this infant here?”

“I’m going to send Gail down to the Catholic Mission, in Kansas.  You remember little Eloise St. Vrain, of course?” Uncle Esmond asked.

“We do!” Beverly assured him.  “Pretty as a doll, gritty as a sand-bar, snappy as a lobster’s claw—­she dwells within my memory yet.”

All girls were little children to us, for the scheme of things had not included them in our affairs.

I threw a handful of grass in the boy’s face, and Uncle Esmond went on.

“She’s been at St. Ann’s School at the Osage Mission down on the Neosho River for two or three years, and now she is going to St. Louis.  In these troublesome times on the border, if I have a personal interest, I feel safer if some big six-footer whom I can trust comes along as an escort from the Neosho to the Missouri,” Uncle Esmond explained.

And then we spoke of other things:  the stream of emigration flowing into the country, the possibilities of the prairies, the future of the city that should hold the key to the whole Southwest, and especially of the chance and value of the trail trade.

“It’s the big artery that carries the nation’s life-blood here,” Esmond Clarenden declared.  “Some day when the West is full of people, and dowered with prosperity, it may remember the men who built the highway for the feet of trade to run in.  And the West may yet measure its greatness somewhat by the honesty and faithfulness of the merchant of the frontier, and more by the courage and persistence of the boys who drove the ox-teams across the plains.  Don’t forget that you yourselves are State-builders now.”

He spoke earnestly, but his words meant little to me.  I was looking out toward the wide-sweeping Kaw and thinking of the journey I must make, and wondering if I should ever feel at ease in the society of women.  Wondering, too, what I should say, and how I should really take care of “Little Lees,” who had crossed the plains with us almost a decade ago; the girl who had held my hand tightly one night at old Fort Bent when the shadow had slipped across the moon and filled the silvery court with a gray, ghostly light.