I lifted his shoulders gently and placed him where his eyes could rest on the majestic scene spread out before him.

“Eloise loves you, but she thinks you would not marry her because they say her father was a murderer.  I don’t believe that, Gail.  I told her that you didn’t, either, not one little minute.  You care for her, I know, and losing her will break your heart.  I tried to tell you long ago, but Little Lees made me promise not to say a word that night at Burlingame when you had gone away and I thought maybe I had a half-chance with her.  Tell me you’ll make her happy, Gail.”

“Oh, Beverly, I’ll do my best,” I murmured, softly.

“Come closer, Gail.  Look at those colors there.  Is it so far across, or only seeming so?  And see the soft white clouds drop purple shadows down.  Is that the way the trail runs?  How beautiful it must be farther on.  Good-by, old boy of my heart’s heart, and don’t forget, however long the years, and wide away your feet may go, to keep the old trail law.  ’Hold fast.’”

We laid them away in the deep pine forest—­Aunty Boone, of strange, prophetic vision; Santan, the cruel Indian; the loyal Hopi maiden; Jondo and Beverly.  God made them all and in His heaven they will be rightly placed.

Beside the canon’s rim, in the soft twilight hour of that October day, Eloise St. Vrain and I plighted our troth, till death us do part—­for just a little while.  Plighted it not in happy, selfish affection, such as youth and maiden give, sometimes, each to each; but in the deep, marvelous love of man and woman pledged where, in sacred moments on that day, we had seen the mortal put on immortality.  To us there could be no grander, richer, lovelier setting for life’s best and holiest hour than here, where, upon things finite, there rests the beneficent uplifting beauty that shadows forth the Infinite.

IV

REMEMBERING THE TRAIL

XXII

THE GOLDEN WEDDING

  The heart that’s never old!  Oh the heart that’s never old!—­
  ’Tis a vision of the lavender, the crimson and the gold
  Of an airy, fairy morning, when the sky is all ablaze
  With an ever-changing splendor, driving back the gloom and haze!

  ’Tis the vision of an orchard in the balmy month of May,
  Where the birds are ever singing, and the leaves are ever gay;
  Where the sun is ever shining with a glory never told,
  And the trees are ever blooming—­for the heart that’s never old!

   —­JAMES E. HILKEY.

The summers and winters of fifty golden years have brought to the plains their balmy breezes and blazing heat, their soft, life-giving showers, and their fierce, blizzard anger.  And down through these fifty years Eloise St. Vrain and I have walked the love trails of the plains together.

In the early spring of this, our “golden-wedding” year, we sat on the veranda of our suburban home in Kansas City, above the picturesque Cliff Drive, rippling with automobiles.  The same drive winds in its course somewhere near the old, rough road that once led from the Clarenden home, above the valley of the Kaw, down to the little city of great promise—­now fulfilled.