ed, will not, in itself, be a
city-builder. The war had brought New Mexico into United States
territory; railroads were slowly creeping westward toward the
Mississippi River; steamboats and big covered wagons were bringing
settlers into Kansas, where little cabins were beginning to mark the
landscape with new hearth-stones. Congress was wrangling over the great
slavery question. The Eastern lawmakers were stupidly opposing the
efforts of Missouri statesmen to extend mail routes westward, or to
spend any energy toward developing that so-called worthless region which
they named "the great American desert." And the old Santa Fe Trail was
now more than ever the highway for the commerical treasures of the
Rocky Mountains and the great Southwest.

It was the time of budding things. In the valley of the Missouri the
black elm boughs, the silvery sycamores and cottonwoods, and the vines
on the gray rock-faced cliffs were veiled in shimmering draperies of
green, with here and there a little group of orchard trees faintly pink
against the landscape's dainty verdure.

Beverly Clarenden and I stood on the deck of a river steamer as it made
the wharf at old Westport Landing, where Esmond Clarenden waited for us.
And long before the steamer's final bump against the pier we had noted
the tall, slender girl standing beside him. We had been away three
years, the only schooling outside of Uncle Esmond's teaching we were
ever to have. We were big boys now, greatly conscious of hands and feet
in our way, "razor broke," Aunty Boone declared, brimful of hilarity and
love of adventure, and eager for the plains life, and the dangers of the
old trail by which we were to conquer or be conquered. In the society of
women we were timid and ill at ease. Aside from this we were
self-conceited, for we knew more of the world and felt ourselves more
important on that spring morning than we ever presumed to know or dared
to feel in all the years that followed.

"Who is she, Gail, that tall one by little fat Uncle Esmond?" Beverly
questioned, as we neared the wharf.

"You don't reckon he's married, Bev? He's all of twenty-four or five
years older than we are, and we aren't calves any more." I replied,
scanning the group on the wharf.

But we forgot the girl in our eagerness to bound down the gang-plank and
hug the man who meant all that home and love could mean to us. In our
three growing years we had almost eliminated Mat Nivers, save as a happy
me