xico."

I tried to fancy what the Indian girl's thoughts might be as the priest
said this, but her face, as usual, gave no clue to her mind's activity.

Where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Wakarusa Father Josef left us to
join a wagon-train going west. Sister Anita, who was hurrying back to
Kentucky, she said, on some churchly errand, took a steamer at Westport
Landing, and the three of us came to the Clarenden home on the crest of
the bluff.

We had washed off our travel stains and come out on the veranda when we
saw Beverly Clarenden standing in the sunlight, waiting for us. I had
never seen him look so handsome as he did that day, dressed in the full
regalia of the plains: a fringed and beaded buckskin coat, dark
pantaloons held inside of high-topped boots, a flannel shirt, with a
broad black silk tie fastened in a big bow at his throat, and his
wide-brimmed felt hat set back from his forehead. Clean-shaven, his
bright brown hair--a trifle long, after the custom of the
frontier--flung back from his brow, his blooming face wearing the happy
smile of youth, his tall form easily erect, he seemed the very
embodiment of that defiant power that swept the old Santa Fe Trail clean
for the feet of its commerce to run swiftly along. I am glad that I
never envied him--brother of my heart, who loved me so.

He was not as surprised as I had been to find the grown-up girl instead
of the little child. That wasn't Beverly's way.

"I'm mighty glad to meet you again," he said, with jaunty air, grasping
Eloise by the hand. "You look just as--shall I say promising, as ever."

"I'm glad to see you, Beverly. You and Gail have been my biggest assets
of memory these many years." Eloise was at ease with him in a moment.
Somehow they never misunderstood each other.

"Oh, I'm always an asset, but Gail here gets to be a liability if you
let him stay around too long."

"Here is somebody else. Don't you remember Little Blue Flower?" Eloise
interrupted him.

"Little Blue Flower! Why, I should say I do! And are you that little
blossom?"

Beverly's face beamed, and he caught the Indian girl's hand in both of
his in a brotherly grasp. He wasn't to blame that nature had made him
frank and unimaginative.

"I haven't forgotten the last time I saw your face in a wide crack
between two adobe shacks. A 'flower in the crannied wall' in that 'pure
water' sand-pile in New Mexico. I'd have plucked you out of the cranny
right then, if old Rex Kra