Vanguards of the Plains | Page 5

you're
coming to."

Mat was digging in the ground with a stick, and she flipped a clod at
Beverly with the last words. Both of us had once expected to marry her
when we grew up, unless Jondo should carry her away as his bride
before that time. He was a dozen years older than Mat, who was only
fourteen and small for her age. A flush always came to her cheeks
when we talked of Jondo in that way. We didn't know why.
We sat silent for a little while. A vague sense of desolateness, of the
turning-places of life, as real to children as to older folk, seemed to
press suddenly down upon all three of us. Ours was not the ordinary
child-life even of that day. And that was a time when children had no
world of their own as they have to-day. Whatever developed men and
women became a part of the younger life training as well. And while
we were ignorant of much that many children then learned early, for we
had lived mostly beside the fort on the edge of the wilderness, we were
alert, and self-dependent, fearless and far-seeing. We could use tools
readily: we could build fires and prepare game for cooking; we could
climb trees, set traps, swim in the creek, and ride horses. Moreover, we
were bound to one another by the force of isolation and need for
playmates. Our imagination supplied much that our surroundings
denied us. So we felt more deeply, maybe, than many city-bred
children who would have paled with fear at dangers that we only
laughed over.
No ripple in the even tenor of our days, however, had given any hint of
the coming of this sudden tense oppression on our young souls, and we
were stunned by what we could neither express nor understand.
"Whatever comes or doesn't come," Beverly said at last, stretching
himself at full length, stomach downward, on the bare ground,
"whatever happens to us, we three will stand by each other always and
always, won't we, Mat?"
He lifted his face to the girl's. Oh, Beverly! I saw him again one day
down the years, stretched out on the ground like this, lifting again a
pleading face. But that belongs--down the years.
"Yes, always and always," Mat replied, and then because she had a
Spartan spirit, she added: "But let's don't say any more that way. Let's
think of what you are going to see--the plains, the Santa Fé Trail, the
mountains, and maybe bad Indians. And even old Santa Fé town itself.
You are in for 'the big shift,' as Aunty Boone says, and you've got to be

little men and take whatever comes. It will come fast enough, you can
bet on that."
Yesterday I might have sobbed on her shoulder. I did not know then
that out on the bluff an hour ago I had come to the first turn in my
life-trail, and that I could not look back now. I did know that I _wanted
to go with Uncle Esmond._ I looked away from Mat's gray eyes, and
Beverly's head dropped on his arms, face downward--looked at nothing
but blue sky, and a graceful drooping flag; nothing but a half-sleepy,
half-active fort; nothing but the yellow April floods far up-stream,
between wooded banks tenderly gray-green in the spring sunshine. But
I did not see any of these things then. Before my eyes there stretched a
vast level prairie, with dim mountain heights beyond them. And
marching toward them westward, westward, past lurking danger,
Indians here and wild beasts there, went three men: the officer on his
cavalry mount; Jondo on his big black horse; Esmond Clarenden,
neither mounted nor on foot, it seemed, but going forward somehow.
And between these three and the misty mountain peaks there was a
face--not Mat Nivers's, for the first time in all my day-dreams--a sweet
face with dark eyes looking straight into mine. And plainly then, just as
plainly as I have heard it many times since then, came a call--the first
clear bugle-note of the child-soul--a call to service, to patriotism, and to
love.
All that afternoon while Mat Nivers sang about her tasks Beverly and I
tried to play together among the elm and cottonwood trees about our
little home, but evening found us wide awake and moping. Instead of
the two tired little sleepy-heads that could barely finish supper, awake,
when night came, we lay in our trundle-bed, whispering softly to each
other and staring at the dark with tear-wet eyes--our spiritual
barometers warning us of a coming change. Something must have
happened to us that night which only the retrospect of years revealed.
In that hour Beverly Clarenden lost a year of his life and I gained one.