and Santa Fe; westward, from the
fur-bearing plateaus of the Rockies, where trappers and traders brought
their precious piles of pelts down the Arkansas; and eastward, half a
thousand miles from the Missouri River frontier--the pathways of a
restless, roving people crossed each other here. And it was toward this
wilderness crossroads that Esmond Clarenden directed his course in that
summertime of my boyhood years.

The heat of a July sun beat pitilessly down on the scorching plains. The
weary trail stretched endlessly on toward a somewhere in the yellow
distance that meant shelter and safety. Spiral gusts of air gathering
out of the low hills to the southeast picked up great cones of dust and
whirled them zigzagging across the brown barren face of the land. Every
draw was bone dry; even the greener growths along their sheltered
sides, where the last moisture hides itself, wore a sickly sallow hue.

Under the burden of this sun-glare, and through these stifling
dust-cones, our little company struggled sturdily forward.

We had left Santa Fe as suddenly and daringly as we had entered it, the
very impossibility of risking such a journey again being our, greatest
safeguard. Esmond Clarenden was doing the thing that couldn't be done,
and doing it quickly.

In the gray dawn after that midnight ride to Agua Fria a little Indian
girl had slipped like a brown shadow across the Plaza. Stopping at the
door of the Exchange Hotel, she leaned against the low slab of petrified
wood that for many a year served as a loafer's roost before the hotel
doorway. Inside the building Jondo caught the clear twitter of a bird's
song at daybreak, twice repeated. A pause, and then it came again,
fainter this time, as if the bird were fluttering away through the Plaza
treetops.

In that pause, the gate in the wall had opened softly, and Aunty Boone's
sharp eyes peered through the crack. The girl caught one glimpse of the
black face, then, dropping a tiny leather bag beside the stone, she sped
away.

A tall young Indian boy, prone on the ground behind a pile of refuse in
the shadowy Plaza, lifted his head in time to see the girl glide along
the portal of the Palace of the Governors and disappear at the corner of
the structure. Then he rose and followed her with silent moccasined
feet.

And Jondo, who had hurried to the hotel door, saw only the lithe form of
an Indian boy across the Plaza. Then his eye fell on the slender bag
beside the ston