I turned away quickly that I might not hear any more.  The rest of that night I sat wide awake and staring at the misty valley of the Kaw, where silvery ripples flashed up here and there against the shadowy sand-bars.

* * * * *

The steamboat for St. Louis left the Westport Landing wharf at six o’clock in the morning, before the mists had lifted over the big yellow Missouri.  From our bluff I saw the smoke belch from its stacks as it pulled away and started down-stream; but only Uncle Esmond and Jondo waited to wave good-by to the sweet-faced girl looking back at them from its deck.  Beverly had overslept, and Little Blue Flower had left an hour earlier with a wagon-train starting west toward Council Grove.  In her room lay the white Grecian robe and the headband of wrought silver with coral pendants.  On the little white pin-cushion on the dressing-table the bright pin-heads spelled out one Hopi word that carries all good will and blessing,

LOLOMI.

Twenty-four hours later Rex Krane left his bride, and he and Bill Banney and Beverly and I, under command of Jondo, started on our long trip overland to Santa Fe.  And two of us carried some memories we hoped to lose when new scenes and certain perils should surround us.

XI

“OUR FRIENDS—­THE ENEMY”

And you all know security
Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.

SHAKESPEARE.

In St. Louis and Kansas City men of Esmond Clarenden’s type were sending out great caravans of goods and receiving return cargoes across the plains—­pioneer trade-builders, uncrowned sovereigns of national expansion—­against whose enduring power wars for conquest are as flashlight to daylight.  And Beverly Clarenden and I, with the whole battalion of plainsmen—­“bull-whackers,” in the common parlance of the Santa Fe Trail—­who drove those caravans to and fro, may also have been State-builders, as Uncle Esmond had declared we would be.  Yet we hardly looked like makers of empire in those summer days when we followed the great wagon-trains along the prairies and over the mountain passes.

Two of us had come home from school hilariously eager for the trail service.  But the silent plains made men thoughtful and introspective.  Days of endless level landscapes under wide-arching skies, and nights in the open beneath the everlasting silent stars, give a man time to get close to himself, to relive his childhood, to measure human values, to hear the voice in the storm-cloud and the song of low-purring winds, to harden against the monotonous glare of sunlight, to defy the burning heat, and to feel—­aye, to feel the spell of crystal day-dawns and the sweetness of velvet-shadowed twilights.  Beverly and I were typical plainsmen in that we never spoke of these things to each other—­that is not the way of the plainsman.

Our company had been organized at Council Grove—­three trains of twenty-six wagons each, drawn by three or four spans of mules or yoke of oxen, guarded by eightscore of “bull-whackers.”  And there were a dozen or more ponies trained for swift riding in cases of emergency.  There were also half a dozen private outfits under protection of the large body.