I turned from the three to greet the priest and give him a place beside me.  His face seemed familiar, but it was not until I heard his voice, in a courteous good-morning, that I knew him to be the Father Josef who had met us on the way into Santa Fe years before, and who later had shown us the little golden-haired girl asleep on the hard bench in the old mission church of Agua Fria.  A page of my boyhood seemed suddenly to have opened there, and I wondered curiously at the meaning of it all.  Life, that for three years had been something of a monotonous round of action for a boy of the frontier, was suddenly filling each day with events worth while.  I wondered many things concerning Father Josef’s presence there, but I had the grace to ask no questions as we five journeyed over the rolling green prairies of Kansas in the pleasant time of year which the Hopi calls the Moon of the Peach Blossom.

The priest appeared hardly a day older than when I had first seen him, and he chatted genially as we rode along.

“We are losing two of our stars,” he said, with a gallant little bow.  “Miss St. Vrain goes to St. Louis to relatives, I believe, and Little Blue Flower, eventually, to New Mexico.  St. Ann’s under Mother Bridget is doing a wonderful work among our people, but it is not often that a girl comes here from such a distance as New Mexico.”

I tried to fancy what the Indian girl’s thoughts might be as the priest said this, but her face, as usual, gave no clue to her mind’s activity.

Where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Wakarusa Father Josef left us to join a wagon-train going west.  Sister Anita, who was hurrying back to Kentucky, she said, on some churchly errand, took a steamer at Westport Landing, and the three of us came to the Clarenden home on the crest of the bluff.

We had washed off our travel stains and come out on the veranda when we saw Beverly Clarenden standing in the sunlight, waiting for us.  I had never seen him look so handsome as he did that day, dressed in the full regalia of the plains:  a fringed and beaded buckskin coat, dark pantaloons held inside of high-topped boots, a flannel shirt, with a broad black silk tie fastened in a big bow at his throat, and his wide-brimmed felt hat set back from his forehead.  Clean-shaven, his bright brown hair—­a trifle long, after the custom of the frontier—­flung back from his brow, his blooming face wearing the happy smile of youth, his tall form easily erect, he seemed the very embodiment of that defiant power that swept the old Santa Fe Trail clean for the feet of its commerce to run swiftly along.  I am glad that I never envied him—­brother of my heart, who loved me so.

He was not as surprised as I had been to find the grown-up girl instead of the little child.  That wasn’t Beverly’s way.

“I’m mighty glad to meet you again,” he said, with jaunty air, grasping Eloise by the hand.  “You look just as—­shall I say promising, as ever.”