come at once; and I went, leaving O'mie
to follow later when he should have rested at the Fort a little.

All Kansas was in its Maytime glory. From the freshly ploughed earth
came up that sweet wholesome odor that like the scent of new-mown hay
carries its own traditions of other days to each of us. The young
orchards--there were not many orchards in Kansas then--were all a blur
of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the
prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended
with the shifting shades of green. Along the waterways the cottonwood's
silvery branches, tipped with tender young leaves fluttering in the soft
wind, stood up proudly above the scrubby bronze and purple growths
hardly yet in bud and leaf. From every gentle swell the landscape swept
away to the vanishing line of distances in billowy seas of green and
gold, while far overhead arched the deep-blue skies of May. Fleecy
clouds, white and soft as foam, drifted about in the limitless fields of
ether. The glory of the new year, the fresh sweet air, the spirit of
budding life, set the pulses a-tingle with the very joy of being. Like a
dream of Paradise lay the Neosho Valley in its wooded beauty, with field
and farm, the meadow, and the open unending prairie rolling away from
it, wave on wave, in the Maytime grace and grandeur. Through this valley
the river itself wound in and out, glistening like molten silver in the
open spaces, and gliding still and shadowy by overhanging cliff and
wooded covert.

"Dever," I said to the stage driver when we had reached the top of the
divide and looked southward to where all this magnificence of nature was
lavishly spread out, "Dever, do you remember that passage in the Bible
about the making of the world long ago, 'And God saw that it was good'?
Well, here's where all that happened."

Dever laughed a crowing laugh of joy. He had hugged me when I took the
stage, I didn't know why. When it came to doing the nice thing, Dever
had a sense of propriety sometimes that better-bred folk might have
envied. And this journey home proved it.

"I've got a errant up west. D'ye's lief come into town that way?" he
asked me.

Would I? I was longing to slip into my home before I ran the gantlet of
all the streets opening on the Santa Fe Trail. I never did know what
Dever's "errant" was, that led him to swing some miles to the west, out
of the way to the ford of the Neosho above the old stone