sas City, above the picturesque Cliff
Drive, rippling with automobiles. The same drive winds in its course
somewhere near the old, rough road that once led from the Clarenden
home, above the valley of the Kaw, down to the little city of great
promise--now fulfilled.

"Eloise, youth may have a charm that is all its own," I said to my wife,
"but I wonder if it really matches the enduring charm of age when one
looks back on busy years of service."

Eloise smiled up at me--the same gracious smile that has lighted all my
days with her.

"You are a dreamer still, Gail. But dreams do so sweeten life and keep
the fires of romance forever burning."

"When did romance begin with you, Little Lees?" I asked.

"I think it was on that day when I came bounding up to the door of the
old San Miguel church," Eloise replied, "and saw you looking like a big,
brown bob-cat, or something else, that might have slept in the Hondo
'Royo all your life. But withal a boy so loyal to the helpless that you
were willing to fight for me against an assailant bigger than yourself.
You became my prince in that hour, and all my dreams since then have
been of you. When did romance begin with you, or have you forgotten in
the busy years of a life swallowed up in mercantile pursuits?"

"My life may have been, as you say, swallowed up in building trade that
builds empire, but I have never forgotten the things that make it fine
to me," I answered her. "Romance for me began one day, long ago, out on
the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth. I've been a Vanguard of the
Plains since then, bull-whacker for the ox-teams that hauled the
commerce of the West; cavalryman in hard-wearing Indian campaigns that
defended the frontier; and merchant, giving measure for measure always,
like that grand man who taught me the worth of business--Esmond
Clarenden."

"On the parade-ground? How there?" Eloise asked.

"It came the day that I first knew we were to go with Uncle Esmond to
Santa Fe--for you. We didn't know that it was for you then. I think I
was born again that day into a daring plainsman, who had been a sort of
baby-boy before. I sat with Mat and Beverly on the edge of the
parade-ground, when I looked up to see, with a boy's day-dreaming eyes,
somewhere this side of misty mountain peaks, a vision of a cloud of
golden hair about a sweet child face, with dark eyes looking into mine.
That vision stayed with me until, one morning, fifty years ago, on the
rim of the