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Updated: May 12, 2025
Eloise, with her clinging creamy draperies, and the vivid red of her silken scarf, and her glorious hair. "Oh, Gail Clarenden, is it really you?" she cried, stretching out both hands toward me with a glad light in her eyes. "Yes, Little Lees, it is I." I took both of her hands in mine. They were soft and white, and mine were brown and horny, but their touch sent a thrill of joy through me.
I'm nobody's slave!" The soft voice was full of menace, the glare of famine and fury was in the burning eyes, and the supple cruelty of the wild beast was in the clenched hands. Esmond Clarenden looked up at her with interest. Then pointing toward our house he said, calmly: "Neither are you anybody's master. Go over there to the kitchen and get your supper.
But these two standing before me were gowned exactly alike, and yet I know that one was purely and artistically Greek, and one was purely and gracefully Indian. "I beg your pardon. I am Mr. Clarenden," I managed to say.
I carry still the keen impression of that moment when I took, unconsciously, the measure of the three: the mounted army man, commander of the fort, big in his official authority and force; Jondo on his great black horse, to me the heroic type of chivalric courage; and between the two, Esmond Clarenden, unmounted, with feet firmly planted, suggesting nothing heroic, nothing autocratic.
The mystery of the human mind is a riddle past my reading and I had always thought of Beverly's as an open book. The only one to whom I could turn now was not Eloise, nor my uncle, nor Mat nor Rex, but Jondo, John Doe, the nameless man, with whom Esmond Clarenden had walked all these years and for whose sake he had rescued Eloise St. Vrain. They had "toted together," as Aunty Boone had said.
For when I turned toward the darkening east and the shadowy camp where the evening fires gleamed redly in the dusk, I knew then, as well as I know now, if I could only have put it into words, that I was not the same little boy who had run up the long slope to see what lay next in to-morrow's journey. I walked slowly back to the camp and sat down beside Esmond Clarenden.
Our Indian runner had found them in the night and sent them toward us. We dashed into the forest, keeping close together; and here, a mile away, under green pines, surrounded by a little group of a desert Hopi clan, was Beverly Clarenden big, strong, unhurt and joyful. And Little Blue Flower.
At the name Little Blue Flower's eyes looked as they did on that hot May night out at Pawnee Rock when she heard Beverly Clarenden's boyish voice ring out, defiantly: "Uncle Esmond, let's take her, and take our chances." But the great light that had leaped into the girl's eyes died slowly out as she gazed at me. "You are not Beverly Clarenden," she said, in a low voice.
"Oh, we are all here but Mat: Clarenden, Jondo, Aunty Boone, and Little Lees; and a squad of half a dozen cavalry men are ready to go with us." Rex drawled in his old Yankee fashion, hiding an aching heart underneath his jovial greeting. "All of us!" I exclaimed. "Yes. Here they all come!" Rex retorted. They all came, but I saw only one, veiling the joy in my eyes as best I could.
"What are you thinking about, Gail?" he asked, as I stared at the fire. "I wish I knew what would happen next," I replied. Jondo was lying at full length on the grass, his elbow bent, and his hand supporting his head. What a wonderful head it was with its crown of softly curling brown hair! "I wonder if we have done wrong by the children, Clarenden," the big plainsman said, slowly.
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