I helped to dig open the curly mesquite and to shovel out the sand.  I heard the burial service, and saw a rudely coffined form lowered into an open grave.  I saw Rex Krane at the head, and Jondo at the foot, and Beverly’s bleeding hands as he scraped the loose earth back and heaped it over that which had been called Sister Anita; I heard Father Josef’s voice of music repeating the “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.”  And then we turned away and left the spot, as men turn every day to the common affairs of life.

Four days later Little Blue Flower came to me as I, still numb and cold and blankly unthinking, sat beside Fort Marcy and looked out with unseeing eyes at the glory of a New-Mexican sunset.

“I come from Eloise.”  The sadness of her face and voice even the Indian’s self-control could not conceal.

“She is sad, but brave, and her mother loves her and calls her ’Little One.’  She will never grow up to her mother.  But”—­Little Blue Flower’s voice faltered and she gazed out at the far Sandia peaks wrapped in the rich purple folds of twilight, with the scarlet of the afterglow beyond them—­“Eloise loves Beverly.  She will always love him.  Heaven meant him for her.”  There were some other broken sentences, but I did not grasp them clearly then.

The world was full of gray shadows.  The finishing touches had been put on life for me.  I looked out at the dying glow in the west, and wondered vaguely if the sun would ever cross the Gloriettas again, or ever the Sangre-de-Christo grow radiant with the scarlet stain of that ineffable beauty that uplifts and purifies the soul of him who looks on it.

XVII

SWEET AND BITTER WATERS

    Trust me, it is something to be cast
    Face to face with one’s self at last,
    To be taken out of the fuss and strife,
    The endless clatter of plate and knife,
    The bore of books, and the bores of the street,
    And to be set down on one’s own two feet
      So nigh to the great warm heart of God,
    You almost seem to feel it beat
      Down from the sunshine, and up from the sod.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

My hair is very white now, and my fingers hold a pen more easily than they could hold the ox-goad or the rifle, and mine to-day is all the backward look.  Which look is evermore a satisfying thing because it takes in all of life behind in its true proportion, where the forward look of youth sees only what comes next and nothing more.  And looking back to-day it seems that, of the many times I walked the long miles of that old Santa Fe Trail, no journey over it stands out quite so clear-cut in my memory as the home trip after I had watched the going away of Eloise, and witnessed the flight of Ferdinand Ramero, and listened to the story of Jondo’s life.