“Bev, how many auld-lang-syners do you reckon we’ll meet in this land of sunshine and chilly beans?” I asked, carelessly.

“Well, how many of them do you remember, Mr. Cyclopedia of Prominent Men and Pretty Women?” Beverly inquired.

“Oh, there was Felix Narveo and Father Josef—­and Little Blue Flower”—­A shadow flitted across my cousin’s face for a moment, leaving it sunny as ever again.

“And there was that black-eyed Marcos boy everywhere, and Ferdinand Ramero whom we were warned to step wide of,” I went on.

“Oh, that tall thin man with blue-glass eyes that cut your fingers when he looked at you.  Maybe he went out the back door of New Mexico when General Kearny peeped in at the front transom.  There wasn’t any fight in that man.”

“Jondo says he is still in Santa Fe.”  Just as I spoke an Indian swept by us, riding with the ease of that born-to-the-horseback race.

“Beverly, do you remember that Indian boy that we saw out at Agua Fria?” I asked.

“The day we found Little Lees asleep in the church?” Beverly broke in, eagerly.

In our whole journey he had hardly spoken of Eloise, and, knowing Beverly as I did, I had felt sure for that reason that she had not been on his mind.  Now twice in five minutes he had called her name.  But why should he not remember her here, as well as I?

“Yes, I remember there was an Indian boy, sort of sneaky like, and deaf and dumb, that followed us until I turned and stared him out of it.  That’s the way to get rid of ’em, Gail, same as a savage dog,” Beverly said, lightly.

“What if there are six of them all staring at you?” I asked.

“Oh, Gail, for the Lord’s sake forget that!”

Beverly cried, affectionately.  “When you’ve got an arrow wound rotting your arm off and six hundred and twenty degrees of fever in your blood, and the son of your old age is gone for three days and nights, and you don’t dare to think where, you’ll know why a fellow doesn’t want to remember.”  There were real tears in the boy’s eyes.  Beverly was deeper than I had thought.

“Well, to change gradually, I wonder if that centaur who just passed us might be that same Indian of Agua Fria of long ago.”

“He couldn’t be,” Beverly declared, confidently.  “That boy got one square look at my eagle eye and he never stopped running till he jumped into the Pacific Ocean.  ‘I shall see him again over there.’” Half chanting the last words, Beverly, boy-hearted and daring and happy, cracked his whip, and our mule-team began to prance off in mule style the journey’s latter end.

Oh, Beverly!  Beverly!  Why did that day on the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth and a boy’s pleading face lifted to mine, come back to me at that moment?  Strange are the lines of life.  I shall never clearly read them all.

Down in the Plaza a tall, slender young man was sitting in the shade, idly digging at the sod with an open pocket-knife.  There was something magnetic about him, the presence that even in a crowd demands a second look.