at the portal lifted his hand in sign of blessing.

"Peace be with you. Do not tarry long," he said. Then, turning to Jondo,
he gazed into the strong, handsome face. "Go in peace. He will not
follow. But forget not to love even your enemies."

In the midnight dimness Jondo's bright smile glowed with all its
courageous sweetness.

"I finished that fight long ago," he said. "I come only to help others."

Long these two, priest and plainsman, stood there with clasped hands,
the gray night mists of the Santa Fe Valley round about them and all the
far stars of the midnight sky gleaming above them.

Then Jondo mounted his horse and rode away up the trail toward Santa Fe.

VIII

THE WILDERNESS CROSSROADS

I will even make a way in the wilderness.
--ISAIAH.

Bent's fort stood alone in the wide wastes of the upper Arkansas valley.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific shores there was in America no more
isolated spot holding a man's home. Out on the north bank of the
Arkansas, in a grassy river bottom, with rolling treeless plains
rippling away on every hand, it reared its high yellow walls in solitary
defiance, mute token of the white man's conquering hand in a savage
wilderness. It was a great rectangle built of adobe brick with walls six
feet through at the base, sloping to only a third of that width at the
top, eighteen feet from the ground. Round bastions, thirty feet high, at
two diagonal corners, gave outlook and defense. Immense wooden doors
guarded a wide gateway looking eastward down the Arkansas River. The
interior arrangement was after the Mexican custom of building, with
rooms along the outer walls all opening into a big _patio_, or open
court. A cross-wall separated this court from the large corral inside
the outer walls at the rear. A portal, or porch, roofed with thatch on
cedar poles, ran around the entire inner rectangle, sheltering the rooms
somewhat from the glare of the white-washed court. A little world in
itself was this Bent's Fort, a self-dependent community in the solitary
places. The presiding genius of this community was William Bent, whose
name is graven hard and deep in the annals of the eastern slopes of the
Rocky Mountain country in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century.

Hither in the middle '40's the wild trails of the West converged:
northward, from the trading-posts of Bent and St. Vrain on the Platte;
south, over the Raton Pass from Taos