* * * * *
And we two were alone together—the dark-eyed girl of my boyhood vision, deep-shrined in the boy-heart’s holy of holies, and I who had waited for her coming. It was the hour of golden sunset and long twilight afterglow on the glistening Flat Rock waters and the green prairies beyond the Neosho.
A sudden awakening came over me, and in one swift instant I understood my boyhood dreams and hopes and visions.
“You will pardon me for coming so abruptly, Miss St. Vrain,” I said. “Mother Bridget told me I would find you here.”
The girl listened to my stumbling words with eyes full of laughter.
“Don’t call me Miss St. Vrain, please. Let me be Eloise, and I can call you Gail. Even with your height and your broad shoulders you haven’t changed much. And in all these years I was always thinking of you growing up just as you are. Let’s sit down and get acquainted again.”
She offered me her hand and we sat down together. I could not speak then, for one sentence was ringing in my ears—“I was always thinking of you.” In those years when Beverly and I had put away all thoughts of sweethearts—they could not be a part of the plainsman’s life before us—sweethearts such as older boys in school boasted about, “she was always thinking of me.” The thought brought a keen hurt as if I had done her some great wrong, and it held me back from words.
She could not interpret my silence, and a look of timidity crept over her young face.
“I didn’t mean to be so—so bold with a stranger,” she began.
“You aren’t bold, and we aren’t strangers. I was just too stupid to think anybody else could get out of childhood except old Bev Clarenden and myself,” I managed to say at last. “I even forgot Mat Nivers, who is a young lady now, and Aunty Boone, who hasn’t changed a kink of her woolly hair. But we couldn’t be strangers. Not after that trip across the plains and living at old Fort Bent as we did.”
I paused, and the memory of that last night at the fort made me steal a glance at Eloise to see if she, too, remembered.
She was fair to see just then, with the pink clouds mirrored on the placid waters reflected in the pink of her cheeks.
“Do you remember what I called you the first time I saw you?” She looked up with shining eyes.
“You called me a big brown bob-cat, and you said I looked like I’d slept in the Hondo ’royo all my life. I know I looked it, too. I’ll forgive you if you will excuse my blunder to-day. What became of that boy, Marcos? Have you ever seen him since you left Santa Fé?” I asked.
The fair face clouded, and a look of longing crept into the big, dark eyes lifted pleadingly a moment to mine. I wanted to take her in my arms right then and look about for something to kill for her sake. Yet I would not, for the gold of all the Mexicos, have touched the hem of her Grecian robe.
“Yes, I have seen Marcos many times. His father went to old Mexico after the war, but the Rameros do not stay long anywhere. Marcos made life miserable for me sometimes.” She paused suddenly.
“The Rameros. Then he was the son of the man who was my uncle’s enemy. Maybe you did as much for him, too, sometimes. You had the spirit to do it, anyhow,” I said, lightly, to hide my real feeling.
“I was a little cat. I’m a lot better now. Let’s not go too much into that time. Tell me where you have been and where you are going.” Eloise changed the subject easily.
“I’ve been in Cincinnati, attending a boys’ school for three years. I start for Santa Fé in two weeks. My uncle’s store is doing a big over land business, and he keeps the ox-teams just fanning one another, coming and going across the prairies. I’m crazy to go and see the open plains again. Cincinnati is a city on stilts, and our little Independence-Westport Landing-Kansas City place, as the Cincinnati of the great American desert, is also pretty bumpy, the last place on earth to put a town—only we can see almost to Santa Fé, New Mexico, from the hilltops. Won’t it be great to view that mud-walled town again? Bev is going, too—to kill a few Indians for our winter’s meat, he says, in his wicked, blood-thirsty way.” So I ran on, glad to be alive in the delicious beauty of that spring evening as we together went back over the days of our young years.
“Gail, may we take another passenger to-morrow?” Eloise asked, suddenly.
“Why, as many as the stage will hold! There’s to be a nun and a priest and yourself. I’m chaperon. I could take the priest on my lap if he isn’t too bulky,” I answered.
“I want to take Po-a-be. I can’t tell you why now.” The lashes dropped over the brown eyes, and I wondered how she could think that I could refuse her anything.
“Oh, we’ll take her on faith and the stage-coach. She can come right to Castle Clarenden and stay till she gets ready to hurdle off to her own ‘wickie up’. She has grown into a beautiful Indian woman, though I couldn’t call her a squaw.”
“She isn’t a squaw. I’m glad to hear you say that. I think it will make her very happy to stay at your home for a while. She will miss me a little when we leave here, maybe,” Eloise said, looking at me with a grateful smile that sent a tingle to my fingertips.
“Won’t you stay, too?” I asked, suddenly realizing that this beautiful girl might slip away as easily as she had come into my life here.
Eloise laughed at my earnestness.
“I couldn’t stay long,” she said, lightly.
“And why not?” I burst in, eagerly. “What have you in Santa Fé?”
“A little money and a lot of memories,” she replied, seriously.
“Oh, I can bring the money up to Kansas for you in an ox-train easily enough, and you could blow up the old mud-box of a town and not hurt a hair on the head of a single memory. You know you can take them anywhere you go. I do mine.”
“I’m going to St. Louis, anyhow,” Eloise returned, “and you have no sacred memories—boys don’t care for things like girls do.”
“They don’t? They don’t? And I have forgotten the little girl who was afraid one moonlit night out in the court at Fort Bent and asked me that I shouldn’t ever let Marcos pull her hair. Yes, boys forget.”
I laid my hand on her arm and bent forward to look into her face. For just one flash those big dark eyes looked straight at me, with something in their depths that I shall never forget.
Then she moved lightly from me.
“Oh, all children remember, I suppose. I do, anyhow—a thousand things I’d like to forget. It is lovely by the river. Suppose we go down there for a little while. I must not stay out here too long.”
I took her arm and we strolled down the quiet path in the twilight sweetness to where the broad Neosho, brim full from the spring rains, swept on between picturesque banks. The afterglow of sunset was flaming gorgeously above the western prairies, and the mists along the Neosho were lavender and mother-of-pearl. And before all this had deepened to purple darkness the full moon would swing up the sky, swathing the earth with a softened radiance. All the beauty of this warm spring night seemed but a setting for this girl in her graceful Greek draperies, with the waving gold of her hair and her dainty pink-and-white coloring.
A new heaven and a new earth had begun for me, and a delicious longing, clean and sweet, that swept every commoner feeling far away. What matter that the life before me be filled with danger, and all the coarse and cruel things of the hard days of the Santa Fé Trail? In that hour I knew the best of life that a young man can know. Its benediction after all these years of change is on me still. Awhile we watched the flashing ripples on the river, and the sky’s darkening afterglow. Then we turned to the moonlit east.
“Do you know what the people of Hopi-land call this month?” Eloise asked.
“I don’t know Hopi words for what is beautiful,” I replied.
“They call it ‘the Moon of the Peach Blossom’, and they cherish the time in their calendar.”
“Then we will be Hopi people,” I declared, “for it was in their Moon of the Peach Blossom that you grew up for me from the little girl who called me a bob-cat down in the doorway of the old San Miguel Church in Santa Fé, and from Aunty Boone’s ‘Little Lees’ at old Fort Bent, to the Eloise of St. Ann’s by the Kansas Neosho.”
The sound of a sweet-toned bell told us that we must not stay longer, and together we followed the path from the Flat Rock up to the academy door. And all the way was like the ways of Paradise to me, for I was in the peach-blossom moon of my own life.