The waters, as I watched them, were all running south toward that vague, down-stream world shut off by trees at a bend of the course.  I waited a long time there for the current to shift to the north, wondering meanwhile about those level-topped forests, and what I might see beyond them if I were sitting on their flat crests.  And, as I wondered, the first dim sense of being shut in came filtering through my childish consciousness.  I could not cross the river.  Big as my playground had always been, I had never been out of sight of the fort’s flagstaff up-stream, nor down-stream.  The wooded ravines blocked me on the southwest.  What lay beyond these limits I had tried to picture again and again.  I had been a dreamer all of my short life, and this new feeling of being shut in, held back, from something slipped upon me easily.

As I sat on the bluff in the April sunshine, I turned my face toward the west and stretched out my chubby arms for larger freedom.  I wanted to see the open level places, wanted till it hurt me.  I could cry easily enough for some things.  I could not cry for this.  It was too deep for tears to reach.  Moreover, this new longing seemed to drop down on me suddenly and overwhelm me, until I felt almost as if I were caught in a net.

As I stared with half-seeing eyes toward the wooded ravines beyond the fort, suddenly through the budding branches I caught sight of a horseman riding down a half-marked trail into a deep hollow.  Horsemen were common enough to forget in a moment, but when this one reappeared on the hither side of the ravine, I saw that the rider’s face was very dark, that his dress, from the sombrero to the spurred heel, was Mexican, and that he was heavily armed, even for a plainsman.  When he reached the top of the bluff he made straight across the square toward my uncle Esmond Clarenden’s little storehouse, and I lost sight of him.

Something about him seemed familiar to me, for the gift of remembering faces was mine, even then.  A fleeting childish memory called up such a face and dress somewhere back in the dim days of babyhood, with the haunting sound of a low, musical voice, speaking in the soft Castilian tongue.

But the memory vanished and I sat a long time gazing at the wooded west that hid the open West of my day-dreams.

Suddenly Jondo came riding up on his big black horse to the very edge of the bluff.

“You are such a little mite, I nearly forgot to see you,” he called, cheerily.  “Your Uncle Esmond wants you right away.  Mat Nivers, or somebody else, sent me to run you down,” he added, leaning over to lift me up to a seat on the horse behind him.