“And why not?” I burst in, eagerly.  “What have you in Santa Fe?”

“A little money and a lot of memories,” she replied, seriously.

“Oh, I can bring the money up to Kansas for you in an ox-train easily enough, and you could blow up the old mud-box of a town and not hurt a hair on the head of a single memory.  You know you can take them anywhere you go.  I do mine.”

“I’m going to St. Louis, anyhow,” Eloise returned, “and you have no sacred memories—­boys don’t care for things like girls do.”

“They don’t?  They don’t?  And I have forgotten the little girl who was afraid one moonlit night out in the court at Fort Bent and asked me that I shouldn’t ever let Marcos pull her hair.  Yes, boys forget.”

I laid my hand on her arm and bent forward to look into her face.  For just one flash those big dark eyes looked straight at me, with something in their depths that I shall never forget.

Then she moved lightly from me.

“Oh, all children remember, I suppose.  I do, anyhow—­a thousand things I’d like to forget.  It is lovely by the river.  Suppose we go down there for a little while.  I must not stay out here too long.”

I took her arm and we strolled down the quiet path in the twilight sweetness to where the broad Neosho, brim full from the spring rains, swept on between picturesque banks.  The afterglow of sunset was flaming gorgeously above the western prairies, and the mists along the Neosho were lavender and mother-of-pearl.  And before all this had deepened to purple darkness the full moon would swing up the sky, swathing the earth with a softened radiance.  All the beauty of this warm spring night seemed but a setting for this girl in her graceful Greek draperies, with the waving gold of her hair and her dainty pink-and-white coloring.

A new heaven and a new earth had begun for me, and a delicious longing, clean and sweet, that swept every commoner feeling far away.  What matter that the life before me be filled with danger, and all the coarse and cruel things of the hard days of the Santa Fe Trail?  In that hour I knew the best of life that a young man can know.  Its benediction after all these years of change is on me still.  Awhile we watched the flashing ripples on the river, and the sky’s darkening afterglow.  Then we turned to the moonlit east.

“Do you know what the people of Hopi-land call this month?” Eloise asked.

“I don’t know Hopi words for what is beautiful,” I replied.

“They call it ‘the Moon of the Peach Blossom’, and they cherish the time in their calendar.”

“Then we will be Hopi people,” I declared, “for it was in their Moon of the Peach Blossom that you grew up for me from the little girl who called me a bob-cat down in the doorway of the old San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, and from Aunty Boone’s ‘Little Lees’ at old Fort Bent, to the Eloise of St. Ann’s by the Kansas Neosho.”