flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man’s cavalry hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which confined it at one side.  Long, heavy-hooped earrings such as women at that time wore, and which heretofore I had never known her to employ, she now disported.  Brown as her face was now becoming, one might indeed, at a little distance, have suspected her to be rather a daughter of the Plains than a belle of civilization.  I made some comment on this.  She responded by sitting the more erect in her saddle and drawing a long, deep breath.

“I think I shall throw away my gloves,” she said, “and hunt up some brass bracelets.  I grow more Indian every day.  Isn’t it glorious, here on the Plains?  Isn’t it glorious!”

It so seemed to me, and I so advised her, saying I wished the western journey might be twice as long.

“But Mr. Orme was saying that he rather thought you might take an escort and go back down the river.”

“I wish Mr. Orme no disrespect,” I answered, “but neither he nor any one else regulates my travel.  I have already told you how necessary it was for me to see your father, Colonel Meriwether.”

“Yes, I remember.  But tell me, why did not your father himself come out?”

I did not answer her for a time.  “My father is dead,” I replied finally.

I saw her face flush in quick trouble and embarrassment.  “Why did you not tell me?  I am so sorry!  I beg your pardon.”

“No,” I answered quietly, “we Quakers never wish to intrude our own griefs, or make any show of them.  I should have told you, but there were many other things that prevented for the time.”  Then, briefly, I reviewed the happenings that had led to my journey into the West.  Her sympathy was sweet to me.

“So now, you see, I ought indeed to return,” I concluded, “but I can not.  We shall be at Laramie now very soon.  After that errand I shall go back to Virginia.”

“And that will be your home?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly.  “I shall settle down and become a staid old farmer.  I shall be utterly cheerless.”

“You must not speak so.  You are young.”

“But you,” I ventured, “will always live with the Army?”

“Why, our home is in Virginia, too, over in old Albemarle, though we don’t often see it.  I have been West since I came out of school, pretty much all the time, and unless there should be a war I suppose I shall stay always out here with my father.  My mother died when I was very young.”

“And you will never come back to quiet old Virginia, where plodding farmers go on as their fathers did a hundred years ago?”

She made no immediate answer, and when she did, apparently mused on other things.  “The Plains,” she said, “how big—­how endless they are!  Is it not all wild and free?”

Always she came back to that same word “free.”  Always she spoke of wildness, of freedom.