lipped across and gently kicked the slumbering form. Two cavalry
blankets rolled apart. A note pinned to the edge of one caught my eye. I
stooped to read:

DEAR GAIL, Don't hate me. I'm sick of army life. They will call me
a coward and if they get me they will shoot me for a deserter. I
have disgraced the Clarenden name. You'll never see me again.
Good-bye, old boy.

BEV.

Deserter!

The yells of all the tribes in the battle on the Prairie Dog Creek
shrieked not so fiercely in my ears as that word rang now. And all the
valley of the Smoky Hill echoed and re-echoed it.

Deserter!

My Beverly--who never told a lie, nor feared a danger, nor ever, except
in self-defense, hurt a creature God had made. I could bury Bev, or
stand beside him on his wedding-day. But Beverly disgraced! O, God of
mercy toward all cowards, pity him!

I sat down beside the blankets I had kicked apart and looked back over
my cousin's life. It offered me no help. I thought of Eloise--and his
longing to see her on the night before; of his struggle to tell me
something. I knew now what that something was. Poor boy!

He was not a boy, he was a man--strong, fearless, happy-hearted. How
could the plains make cowards out of such as he? They had made a man of
Jondo, who had all excuse to play the coward. The mystery of the human
mind is a riddle past my reading--and I had always thought of Beverly's
as an open book. The only one to whom I could turn now was not Eloise,
nor my uncle, nor Mat nor Rex, but Jondo, John Doe, the nameless man,
with whom Esmond Clarenden had walked all these years and for whose sake
he had rescued Eloise St. Vrain. They had "toted together," as Aunty
Boone had said. Oh, Aunty Boone with dull eyes of prophecy! I could hear
her soft voice saying:

"If you get into trouble, Mr. Bev, I come, hot streaks, to help you."

She could not come "hot streaks" now, for Beverly had deserted. But
there was Jondo.

I wrote at once to him, inclosing the crumpled note, and then, as one
who walks with neither sight nor feeling any more, I rode the plains and
did a man's part in that Eighteenth Cavalry campaign of '67. The days
went slowly by, bringing the long, bright autumn beauty to the plains
and turning all the elms to gold along the creek at Burlingame. Time
took away the sharp edge from our grief and shame, and left the dull
pain that wears deeper and deeper, unnoticed by us; and all of us who
had loved B