“You are not Beverly Clarenden,” she said, in a low voice.

“No, I’m Gail, the little one.  Bev is up at Fort Leavenworth now,” I replied.

She turned away without a word and, gathering her draperies about her, sped up the pathway toward the fields above the creek.

* * * * *

And we two were alone together—­the dark-eyed girl of my boyhood vision, deep-shrined in the boy-heart’s holy of holies, and I who had waited for her coming.  It was the hour of golden sunset and long twilight afterglow on the glistening Flat Rock waters and the green prairies beyond the Neosho.

A sudden awakening came over me, and in one swift instant I understood my boyhood dreams and hopes and visions.

“You will pardon me for coming so abruptly, Miss St. Vrain,” I said.  “Mother Bridget told me I would find you here.”

The girl listened to my stumbling words with eyes full of laughter.

“Don’t call me Miss St. Vrain, please.  Let me be Eloise, and I can call you Gail.  Even with your height and your broad shoulders you haven’t changed much.  And in all these years I was always thinking of you growing up just as you are.  Let’s sit down and get acquainted again.”

She offered me her hand and we sat down together.  I could not speak then, for one sentence was ringing in my ears—­“I was always thinking of you.”  In those years when Beverly and I had put away all thoughts of sweethearts—­they could not be a part of the plainsman’s life before us—­sweethearts such as older boys in school boasted about, “she was always thinking of me.”  The thought brought a keen hurt as if I had done her some great wrong, and it held me back from words.

She could not interpret my silence, and a look of timidity crept over her young face.

“I didn’t mean to be so—­so bold with a stranger,” she began.

“You aren’t bold, and we aren’t strangers.  I was just too stupid to think anybody else could get out of childhood except old Bev Clarenden and myself,” I managed to say at last.  “I even forgot Mat Nivers, who is a young lady now, and Aunty Boone, who hasn’t changed a kink of her woolly hair.  But we couldn’t be strangers.  Not after that trip across the plains and living at old Fort Bent as we did.”

I paused, and the memory of that last night at the fort made me steal a glance at Eloise to see if she, too, remembered.

She was fair to see just then, with the pink clouds mirrored on the placid waters reflected in the pink of her cheeks.

“Do you remember what I called you the first time I saw you?” She looked up with shining eyes.

“You called me a big brown bob-cat, and you said I looked like I’d slept in the Hondo ’royo all my life.  I know I looked it, too.  I’ll forgive you if you will excuse my blunder to-day.  What became of that boy, Marcos?  Have you ever seen him since you left Santa Fe?” I asked.