e to see your father, Colonel Meriwether."

"Yes, I remember. But tell me, why did not your father himself come
out?"

I did not answer her for a time. "My father is dead," I replied finally.

I saw her face flush in quick trouble and embarrassment. "Why did you
not tell me? I am so sorry! I beg your pardon."

"No," I answered quietly, "we Quakers never wish to intrude our own
griefs, or make any show of them. I should have told you, but there were
many other things that prevented for the time." Then, briefly, I
reviewed the happenings that had led to my journey into the West. Her
sympathy was sweet to me.

"So now, you see, I ought indeed to return," I concluded, "but I can
not. We shall be at Laramie now very soon. After that errand I shall go
back to Virginia."

"And that will be your home?"

"Yes," I said bitterly. "I shall settle down and become a staid old
farmer. I shall be utterly cheerless."

"You must not speak so. You are young."

"But you," I ventured, "will always live with the Army?"

"Why, our home is in Virginia, too, over in old Albemarle, though we
don't often see it. I have been West since I came out of school, pretty
much all the time, and unless there should be a war I suppose I shall
stay always out here with my father. My mother died when I was very
young."

"And you will never come back to quiet old Virginia, where plodding
farmers go on as their fathers did a hundred years ago?"

She made no immediate answer, and when she did, apparently mused on
other things. "The Plains," she said, "how big--how endless they are!
Is it not all wild and free?"

Always she came back to that same word "free." Always she spoke of
wildness, of freedom.

"For all one could tell, there might be lions and tigers and camels and
gazelles out there." She gestured vaguely toward the wide horizon. "It
is the desert."

We rode on for a time, silent, and I began to hum to myself the rest of
the words of an old song, then commonly heard:

"O come with me, and be my love,
For thee the jungle's depths I'll rove.
I'll chase the antelope over the plain,
And the tiger's cub I'll bind with a chain,
And the wild gazelle with the silvery feet
I'll give to thee for a playmate sweet."

"Poets," said I, "can very well sing about such things, but perhaps they
could not practice all they sing. They always--"

"Hush!" she whispered, drawing her horse gently down to a walk, and
finally to a pause. "Look