miss me a
little when we leave here, maybe," Eloise said, looking at me with a
grateful smile that sent a tingle to my fingertips.

"Won't you stay, too?" I asked, suddenly realizing that this beautiful
girl might slip away as easily as she had come into my life here.

Eloise laughed at my earnestness.

"I couldn't stay long," she said, lightly.

"And why not?" I burst in, eagerly. "What have you in Santa Fe?"

"A little money and a lot of memories," she replied, seriously.

"Oh, I can bring the money up to Kansas for you in an ox-train easily
enough, and you could blow up the old mud-box of a town and not hurt a
hair on the head of a single memory. You know you can take them anywhere
you go. I do mine."

"I'm going to St. Louis, anyhow," Eloise returned, "and you have no
sacred memories--boys don't care for things like girls do."

"They don't? They don't? And I have forgotten the little girl who was
afraid one moonlit night out in the court at Fort Bent and asked me that
I shouldn't ever let Marcos pull her hair. Yes, boys forget."

I laid my hand on her arm and bent forward to look into her face. For
just one flash those big dark eyes looked straight at me, with something
in their depths that I shall never forget.

Then she moved lightly from me.

"Oh, all children remember, I suppose. I do, anyhow--a thousand things
I'd like to forget. It is lovely by the river. Suppose we go down there
for a little while. I must not stay out here too long."

I took her arm and we strolled down the quiet path in the twilight
sweetness to where the broad Neosho, brim full from the spring rains,
swept on between picturesque banks. The afterglow of sunset was flaming
gorgeously above the western prairies, and the mists along the Neosho
were lavender and mother-of-pearl. And before all this had deepened to
purple darkness the full moon would swing up the sky, swathing the earth
with a softened radiance. All the beauty of this warm spring night
seemed but a setting for this girl in her graceful Greek draperies, with
the waving gold of her hair and her dainty pink-and-white coloring.

A new heaven and a new earth had begun for me, and a delicious longing,
clean and sweet, that swept every commoner feeling far away. What matter
that the life before me be filled with danger, and all the coarse and
cruel things of the hard days of the Santa Fe Trail? In that hour I knew
the best of life that a young man can know. Its benediction