The sound of footsteps and the murmur of soft voices fitted into the sweetness of that evening hour as two girls, one of them an Indian, came slowly down a well-worn path from the fields above the Flat Rock Valley.  They did not see me as they sat down on some broad stones beside the stream.

I started forward to make myself known, but caught myself mid-step, for here was a picture to make any man pause.

The Indian girl facing me was Little Blue Flower, the Kiowas’ captive, whom we had rescued at Pawnee Rock.  Her heavy black hair was coiled low on her neck, a headband of fine silverwork with pink coral pendants was bound about her forehead and gleaming against her jetty hair.  With her well-poised head, her pure Indian features, her lustrous dark eyes, her smooth brown skin, her cheeks like the heart of those black-red roses that grow only in richest soil—­surely there was no finer type of that vanishing race in all the Indian pueblos of the Southwest.  But the girl beside her!  Was it really so many years ago that I stood by the bushes on the Flat Rock’s edge and saw that which I see so clearly now?  Then these years have been gracious indeed to me.  The sun’s level beams fell on the masses of golden waves that swept in soft little ripples back from the white brow to a coil of gold on the white neck, held, like the Indian girl’s, with a headband of wrought silver, and goldveined turquoise; it fell on the clear, smooth skin, the pink bloom of the cheek, the red lips, the white teeth, the big dark eyes with their fringe of long lashes beneath straight-penciled dark brows; on the curves of the white throat and the round white arms.  Only a master’s hand could make you see these two, beautiful in their sharp contrast of deep brown and scarlet against the dainty white and gold.

“Oh, Little Blue Flower, it will not make me change.”

I caught the words as I stepped toward the two, and the Indian’s soft, mournful answer: 

“But you are Miss St. Vrain now.  You go away in the morning—­and I love you always.”

The heart in me stopped just when all its flood had reached my face.

“Miss St. Vrain,” I repeated, aloud.

The two sprang up.  That afternoon they had been dressed for a girls’ frolic in some Grecian fashion.  I cannot tell a Watteau pleat from window-curtain.  I am only a man, and I do not name draperies well.  But these two standing before me were gowned exactly alike, and yet I know that one was purely and artistically Greek, and one was purely and gracefully Indian.

“I beg your pardon.  I am Mr. Clarenden,” I managed to say.

At the name Little Blue Flower’s eyes looked as they did on that hot May night out at Pawnee Rock when she heard Beverly Clarenden’s boyish voice ring out, defiantly: 

“Uncle Esmond, let’s take her, and take our chances.”

But the great light that had leaped into the girl’s eyes died slowly out as she gazed at me.