enemy.

SHAKESPEARE.

In St. Louis and Kansas City men of Esmond Clarenden's type were sending
out great caravans of goods and receiving return cargoes across the
plains--pioneer trade-builders, uncrowned sovereigns of national
expansion--against whose enduring power wars for conquest are as
flashlight to daylight. And Beverly Clarenden and I, with the whole
battalion of plainsmen--"bull-whackers," in the common parlance of the
Santa Fe Trail--who drove those caravans to and fro, may also have been
State-builders, as Uncle Esmond had declared we would be. Yet we hardly
looked like makers of empire in those summer days when we followed the
great wagon-trains along the prairies and over the mountain passes.

Two of us had come home from school hilariously eager for the trail
service. But the silent plains made men thoughtful and introspective.
Days of endless level landscapes under wide-arching skies, and nights
in the open beneath the everlasting silent stars, give a man time to get
close to himself, to relive his childhood, to measure human values, to
hear the voice in the storm-cloud and the song of low-purring winds, to
harden against the monotonous glare of sunlight, to defy the burning
heat, and to feel--aye, to feel the spell of crystal day-dawns and the
sweetness of velvet-shadowed twilights. Beverly and I were typical
plainsmen in that we never spoke of these things to each other--that is
not the way of the plainsman.

Our company had been organized at Council Grove--three trains of
twenty-six wagons each, drawn by three or four spans of mules or yoke of
oxen, guarded by eightscore of "bull-whackers." And there were a dozen
or more ponies trained for swift riding in cases of emergency. There
were also half a dozen private outfits under protection of the large
body.

The usual election before starting had made Jondo captain of the whole
company. His was the controlling type of spirit that could have bent a
battalion or swayed a Congress. For all the commanders and lawmakers of
that day were not confined to the army and to Congress. Some of them
escaped to the West and became sovereigns of service there. And Jondo
had need for an intrepid spirit to rule that group of men, as that
journey across the plains proved.

On the day before we left Council Grove he was sitting with the heads of
the other wagon-trains under a big oak-tree, perfecting final plans for
the journey.

"Gail, I want you t