Steven knew now that the thing he most wanted was to stay in the mountains, to trade with New Mexico and to mingle in the company of Indians and fighters, of traders and exploring trappers. Not to Chihuahua would his pilgrimage be, to buy brocades and bracelets of garnets for his sweetheart, as the young swains of New Spain were wont, to show their valor, braving Indians and deserts--but to New Orleans, where one day he would take his bride to the home of his parents. He hung about her neck a riband from which dangled the tiny silver wagon of the caravans. “Next year we shall travel with them, _verdad_?” While they waited for the fraile to come over from his house, whither Ceran St. Vrain had sent to fetch him, Consuelo lifted a radiant face, dewy with tears. “And our house shall be furnished not from Chihuahua, not from Spain, but from America, and the bodegas of Mercer & Son.” _De Despedida_ And so Steven and Consuelo lived in the land of the Red Trail’s end and built for the coming empire from the East. Though the Trail was crimsoned for a quarter of a century afterward with the blood of pioneers, and the prairies encarnadined with the dying buffalo, still the silver caravans came. Over the Red Trail Consuelo and Steven traveled in their youth, again in middle life, to find upon their return a Santa Fe which was now within the borders of the United States, an American territory. When civil war divided North and South and the house of Mercer & Co. came to ruin, Steven in his maturity knew why he had left home, and his father and mother, to found a new fortune. Steven did not live to see the snorting iron horse steam along the banks of the Arkansas. And the city which was first to be founded, three centuries before, by the Conquistadores of Old Spain was the last to be relinquished by Spanish-speaking rulers, to learn the tongue of new conquerors and become one of the United States. Yet had it not been for Bent, St. Vrain, Hope and Don Tiburcio, Consuelo and Steven, the Villa de Santa Fe would never have rendered herself peacefully over to the Americans.