It must have been nearly midnight when I crept out of bed and slipped into the big room where Uncle Esmond and Jondo sat by the fireplace, talking together.

“Hello, little night-hawk!  Come here and roost,” Jondo said, opening his arms to me.

I slid into their embrace and snuggled my head against his broad shoulder, listening to all that was said.  Three months later the little boy had become a little man, and my cuddling days had given place to the self-reliance of the fearless youngster of the trail.

“Why do you make this trip now, Esmond?” Jondo asked at length, looking straight into my uncle’s face.

“I want to get down there right now because I want to get a grip on trade conditions.  I can do better after the war if I do.  It won’t last long, and we are sure to take over a big piece of ground there when it is over.  And when that is settled commerce must do the real building-up of the country.  I want to be a part of that thing and grow with it.  Why do you go with me?”

My uncle looked directly at Jondo, although he asked the question carelessly.

“To help you cross the plains.  You know the redskins get worse every trip,” Jondo answered, lightly.

I stared at both of them until Jondo said, laughingly: 

“You little owl, what are you thinking about?”

“I think you are telling each other stories,” I replied, frankly.

For somehow their faces made me think of Beverly’s face out on the parade-ground that morning, when he had lifted it and looked at Mat Nivers; and their voices, deep bass as they were, sounded like Beverly’s voice whispering between his sobs, before he went to sleep.

Both men smiled and said nothing.  But when I went to my bed again Jondo tucked the covers about me and Uncle Esmond came and bade me good night.

“I guess you have the makings of a plainsman,” he said, with a smile, as he patted me on the head.

“The beginnings, anyhow,” Jondo added.  “He can see pretty far already.”

For a long time I lay awake, thinking of all that Uncle Esmond and Jondo had said to me.  It is no wonder that I remember that April day as if it were but yesterday.  Such days come only to childhood, and oftentimes when no one of older years can see clearly enough to understand the bigness of their meaning to the child who lives through them.

All of my life I had heard stories of the East, of New York and St. Louis, where there were big houses and wonderful stores.  And of Washington, where there was a President, and a Congress, and a strange power that could fill and empty Fort Leavenworth at will.  I had heard of the Great Lakes, and of cotton-fields, and tobacco-plantations, and sugar-camps, and ships, and steam-cars.  I had pictured these things a thousand times in my busy imagination and had longed to see them.  But from that day they went out of my life-dreams.  Henceforth I belonged to the prairies of the West.  No one but myself took account of this, nor guessed that a life-trend had had its commencement in the small events of one unimportant day.