Vanguards of the Plains Part 18

At the low hissing sound of the last sentence there was a swift scrambling along the shadows of the porch, and a door near the kitchen snapped shut. The big s.h.i.+ning face of the African woman glistened above us and the court was flooded again with the moon's silvery radiance. As we all sprang up to rush for our rooms, "Little Lees" pulled me toward her and gently kissed my cheek.

"You never would let Marcos in if he came to Fort Leavenworth, would you?" she whispered.

"I'd break his head clear off first," I whispered back, and then we scampered away.

That night I dreamed again of the level plains and Uncle Esmond and misty mountain peaks, but the dark eyes were not there, though I watched long for them.

The next day we left Fort Bent, and when I pa.s.sed that way again it was a great ma.s.s of yellow mounds, with a piece of broken wall standing desolately here and there, a wreck of the past in a solitary land.

II

BUILDING THE TRAIL

IX

IN THE MOON OF THE PEACH BLOSSOM

Love took me softly by the hand, Love led me all the country o'er, And showed me beauty in the land, That I had never seen before.

--ANONYMOUS.

You might not be able to find the house to-day, nor the high bluff whereon it stood. So many changes have been wrought in half a century that what was green headland and wooded valley in the far '50's may be but a deep cut or a big fill for a new roadway or factory site to-day.

So diligently has Kansas City fulfilled the scriptural prophecy that "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low."

Where the great stream bends to the east, the rugged heights about its elbow, Aunty Boone, in those days, was wont to declare, did not offer enough level ground to set a hen on. Small reason was there then to hope that a city, great and gracious, would one day cover those rough ravines and grace those slopes and hilltops in the angle between the Missouri and the Kaw.

Aunty Boone had resented leaving Fort Leavenworth when the Clarenden business made the young city at the Kaw's mouth more desirable for a home. But Esmond Clarenden foresaw that a military post, when the protection it offers is no longer needed, will not, in itself, be a city-builder. The war had brought New Mexico into United States territory; railroads were slowly creeping westward toward the Mississippi River; steamboats and big covered wagons were bringing settlers into Kansas, where little cabins were beginning to mark the landscape with new hearth-stones. Congress was wrangling over the great slavery question. The Eastern lawmakers were stupidly opposing the efforts of Missouri statesmen to extend mail routes westward, or to spend any energy toward developing that so-called worthless region which they named "the great American desert." And the old Santa Fe Trail was now more than ever the highway for the commerical treasures of the Rocky Mountains and the great Southwest.

It was the time of budding things. In the valley of the Missouri the black elm boughs, the silvery sycamores and cottonwoods, and the vines on the gray rock-faced cliffs were veiled in s.h.i.+mmering draperies of green, with here and there a little group of orchard trees faintly pink against the landscape's dainty verdure.

Beverly Clarenden and I stood on the deck of a river steamer as it made the wharf at old Westport Landing, where Esmond Clarenden waited for us.

And long before the steamer's final b.u.mp against the pier we had noted the tall, slender girl standing beside him. We had been away three years, the only schooling outside of Uncle Esmond's teaching we were ever to have. We were big boys now, greatly conscious of hands and feet in our way, "razor broke," Aunty Boone declared, brimful of hilarity and love of adventure, and eager for the plains life, and the dangers of the old trail by which we were to conquer or be conquered. In the society of women we were timid and ill at ease. Aside from this we were self-conceited, for we knew more of the world and felt ourselves more important on that spring morning than we ever presumed to know or dared to feel in all the years that followed.

"Who is she, Gail, that tall one by little fat Uncle Esmond?" Beverly questioned, as we neared the wharf.

"You don't reckon he's married, Bev? He's all of twenty-four or five years older than we are, and we aren't calves any more." I replied, scanning the group on the wharf.

But we forgot the girl in our eagerness to bound down the gang-plank and hug the man who meant all that home and love could mean to us. In our three growing years we had almost eliminated Mat Nivers, save as a happy memory, for mails were slow in those days and we were poor letter-writers; and we had wondered how to meet her properly now. But when the tall, slender girl on the wharf came forward and we looked into the wide gray eyes of our old-time playmate whom, as little boys, we had both vowed to marry, we forgot everything in our overwhelming love for our comrade-in-arms, our jolliest friend and counselor.

"Oh, Mat, you miserable thing!" Beverly bubbled, hugging her in his arms.

"You are just bigger and sweeter than ever. I mistook you for Aunty Boone at first," I chimed in, kissing her on each cheek. And we all bundled away in an old-fas.h.i.+oned, low-swung carriage, happy as children again, with no barrier between us and the dear playmate of the past.

The new home, on the high crest overlooking the Missouri valley, nestled deep in the shade of maple and elm trees, a mansion, compared to that log house of blessed memory at Fort Leavenworth. A winding road led up the steep slope from a wooded ravine where a trail ran out from the little city by the river's edge. Vistas of sheer cliff and stretches of the muddy on-sweeping Missouri and the full-bosomed Kaw, with scrubby timbered ravines and growing groves of forest trees, offered themselves at every turn. And from the top of the bluff the world unrolled in a panorama of nature's own shaping and coloring.

The house was built of stone, with vines climbing about its thick walls, and broad veranda. And everywhere Mat's hands had put homey touches of comfort and beauty. An hundredfold did she return to Esmond Clarenden all the care and protection he had given to her in her orphaned childhood. And, after all, it was not military outposts, nor railroads, nor mail-lines alone that pushed back the wilderness frontier. It was the hand of woman that also builded empire westward.

"Mat's got her wish at last," I said, as we sat with Uncle Esmond after dinner under a big maple tree and looked out at the far yellow Missouri, churning its spring floods to foam against the snags along its high-water bound.

"What's Mat's wish?" Uncle Esmond asked.

"To have a good home and _stay there_. She wished that one night, years ago back in old Fort Bent. Don't you remember, Bev, when we were out in the court, and how scared blue we all were when the moon went under a cloud, and that Indian boy, Santan, was creeping between us and the home base?"

"No, I don't remember anything except that we were in Fort Bent. Got in by the width of a hair ahead of some Mexicans and Indians, and got out again after a jolly six weeks. What's the real job for us now, Uncle Esmond?"

Uncle Esmond was staring out toward the Kaw valley, rimmed by high bluffs in the distance.

"I don't know about Mat having her wish," he said, thoughtfully, "but never mind. Trade is booming and I'm needing help on the trail this spring. Jondo starts west in two weeks."

Beverly and I sprang up. Six feet of height, muscular, adventure-loving, fearless, we had been made to order for the Santa Fe Trail. And if I was still a dreamer and caught sometimes the finer side of ideals, where Beverly Clarenden saw only the matter-of-fact, visible things, no shrewder, braver, truer plainsman ever walked the long distances of the old Santa Fe Trail than this boy with his bright face and happy-go-lucky spirit unpained by dreams, untrammeled by fancies.

"Two weeks! We are ready to start right after supper," we declared.

"Oh, I have other matters first," Uncle Esmond said. "Beverly, you must go up to Fort Leavenworth and arrange a lot of things with Banney for this trip. He's to go, too, because military escort is short this season."

"Suits me!" Beverly declared. "Old Bill Banney and I always could get along together. And this infant here?"

"I'm going to send Gail down to the Catholic Mission, in Kansas. You remember little Eloise St. Vrain, of course?" Uncle Esmond asked.

"We do!" Beverly a.s.sured him. "Pretty as a doll, gritty as a sand-bar, snappy as a lobster's claw--she dwells within my memory yet."

All girls were little children to us, for the scheme of things had not included them in our affairs.

I threw a handful of gra.s.s in the boy's face, and Uncle Esmond went on.

"She's been at St. Ann's School at the Osage Mission down on the Neosho River for two or three years, and now she is going to St. Louis. In these troublesome times on the border, if I have a personal interest, I feel safer if some big six-footer whom I can trust comes along as an escort from the Neosho to the Missouri," Uncle Esmond explained.

And then we spoke of other things: the stream of emigration flowing into the country, the possibilities of the prairies, the future of the city that should hold the key to the whole Southwest, and especially of the chance and value of the trail trade.

"It's the big artery that carries the nation's life-blood here," Esmond Clarenden declared. "Some day when the West is full of people, and dowered with prosperity, it may remember the men who built the highway for the feet of trade to run in. And the West may yet measure its greatness somewhat by the honesty and faithfulness of the merchant of the frontier, and more by the courage and persistence of the boys who drove the ox-teams across the plains. Don't forget that you yourselves are State-builders now."

He spoke earnestly, but his words meant little to me. I was looking out toward the wide-sweeping Kaw and thinking of the journey I must make, and wondering if I should ever feel at ease in the society of women.

Wondering, too, what I should say, and how I should really take care of "Little Lees," who had crossed the plains with us almost a decade ago; the girl who had held my hand tightly one night at old Fort Bent when the shadow had slipped across the moon and filled the silvery court with a gray, ghostly light.

That night the old heart-hunger of childhood came back to me, the visions of the day-dreaming little boy that were almost forgotten in the years that had brought me to young manhood. And clearly again, as when I heard Uncle Esmond's voice that night on the tableland above the valley of the Santa Fe, I heard his gentle words:

"Sometimes the things we long for in our dreams we must fight for, and even die for, that those who come after us may be the better for our having them."

But these thoughts pa.s.sed with the night, and in my youth and inexperience I took on a spirit of fatherly importance as I went down to St. Ann's to safeguard a little girl on her way through the Kansas territory to the Missouri River.

It had been a beautiful day, and there was a freshness in the soft evening breeze, and an up-springing sweetness from the prairies. A shower had pa.s.sed that way an hour before, and the spirit of growing things seemed to fill the air with a voiceless music.