ing eyes, but said nothing.

"That's little Charlie Bent. His daddy runs this splendid fort. His
mother is a Cheyenne squaw, and he's a grim clinger of a half-breed.
Some day he'll be a terror on these plains. It's in him, I know. But
that won't interfere with us any. And you children are a lot safer here
than out on the trail. Great God! I wonder we ever got you here!" Rex's
face was very grave. "Now go to sleep and wake up well. No more thinkin'
like a man. You can be a child again for a while."

Those were happy days that followed. Safe behind the strong walls of old
Fort Bent, we children had not a care; and with the stress and strain of
the trail life lifted from our young minds, we rebounded into happy
childhood living. Every day offered a new drama to our wonder-loving
eyes. We watched the big hide-press for making buffalo robes and furs
into snug bales. We climbed to the cupola of the headquarters department
and saw the soldiers marching by on their way to New Mexico. We saw the
Ute and the Red River Comanche come filing in on their summer
expeditions from the mountains. We saw the trade lines from the far
north bearing down to this wilderness crossroads with their early fall
stock for barter.

Our playground was the court off which all the rooms opened. And however
wild and boisterous the scenes inside those walls in that summer of
1846, in four young lives no touch of evil took root. Stronger than the
six-feet width of wall, higher than the eighteen feet of adobe brick
guarding us round about, was the stern strength of the young Boston man
interned in the fort to protect us from within, as the strength of that
structure defended us from without.

And yet he might have failed sometimes, had it not been for Aunty Boone.
Nobody trifled with her.

"You let them children be. An give 'em the run of this shack," she
commanded of the lesser powers whose business was to domineer over the
daily life there. "The man that makes trouble wide as a needle is across
is goin' to meet me an' the Judgment Day the same minute."

"When Daniel gets on her crack-o'-doom voice, the mountains goin' to
skip like rams and the little hills like lambs, an' the Army of the West
won't be necessary to protect the frontier," Rex declared. But he knew
her worth to his cause, and he welcomed it.

And so with her brute force and his moral strength we were unconsciously
intrenched in a safety zone in this far-isolated place.

With neithe