idden well. I wish you a safe journey, and I hope you'll find your
cousin soon. He was a splendid boy until this happened. He may be
cleared some day."

"He is splendid still to me in spite of everything," I replied.

"Yes, yes," my colonel responded. "Never a Clarenden disgraced the name
before. That is why General Sheridan is granting you a squad to help
you. It is a great thing to have a good name. Good-by."

"Good-by. I thank you a thousand times," I said, saluting him.

"And I thank you. A chain, you know, is as strong as its weakest link. A
cavalry troop is as able as its soldiers make it."

He turned his horse about, and I rode off alone across the lonely plains
a hundred miles away toward old Fort Dodge, beside the Arkansas River.
Jondo and Rex were to meet me there for one more trip on the long Santa
Fe Trail.

Late September rains had blessed the valley of the Arkansas. The level
land about Fort Dodge showed vividly green against the yellow sand-hills
across the river, and the brown, barren bluffs westward, where a little
city would one day rise in pretty picturesqueness. The scene was like
the Garden of Eden to my eyes when I broke through the rough ridges to
the north on the last lap of my long ride thither and hurried down to
the fort. I grant I did not appear like one who had a right to enter
Eden, for I was as brown as a Malayan. Nearly four months of hard
riding, sleeping on the ground, with a sky-cover, eating buffalo meat,
and drinking the dregs of slow-drying pools, had made a plainsman of me,
of the breed that long since disappeared. Golf-sticks and automobile
steering-wheels are held by hands to-day no less courageous than those
that swung the carbine into place, and flung aside the cavalry
bridle-rein in a wild onslaught in our epic day. Each age grows men,
flanked by the coward and the reckless daredevil.

Rex Krane was first to recognize me when I reached the fort.

"Oh, we are all here but Mat: Clarenden, Jondo, Aunty Boone, and Little
Lees; and a squad of half a dozen cavalry men are ready to go with us."
Rex drawled in his old Yankee fashion, hiding an aching heart underneath
his jovial greeting.

"All of us!" I exclaimed.

"Yes. Here they all come!" Rex retorted.

They all came, but I saw only one, veiling the joy in my eyes as best I
could. For with the face of Eloise before me, I knew the hardest battle
of my life was calling me to colors. I had forgotten how womanly she
was,