re out some of the
muskrats. Failing in this, she picked up her shoes and stockings and
went around the slough to find out if any green leaves were unfolding
yet in the wild-plum thicket. A little later she climbed the bluff to
the corn-field, making a diligent search for Indian arrowheads all the
way.

When she reached the seed-bag again, she threw the string over her head
and started up a row determinedly. For a rod or more she did not pause
either to be polite or to scare away gophers, but hurried along very
fast, with her eyes to the ground. Suddenly she chanced to look just
ahead of her, and stopped abruptly, standing erect. Her shadow pointed
straight for the bluff: it was noon and high time to eat dinner.

She sat down on the marker and munched her sandwiches of salted lard and
corn-meal bread with great appetite. She was just finishing them when
the call of a goose far overhead attracted her attention. She got down
and lay flat on her back, with her head on the seed-bag, to watch the
flock, high above her, speeding northward to the lakes, their leader
crying commands to the gray company that flew in V-shaped order behind
him. When the geese were but a dark thread across the north sky, she
felt drowsy and, turning on her side with her hat over her face and her
back to the gentle spring breeze, went fast asleep.

She lay there for hours, entirely unaware of the saucy stares of several
gophers who paused in their hunt for kernels and stood straight as
picket-pins to watch and wonder at the little heap of pink calico under
the battered sailor-hat, or whisked about her, their short legs
flashing, their tails wide and bushy, their cheek-pouches so full of
kernels that they smiled fatly when they looked at her, and showed four
long front teeth. But the little girl was wrapped in a happy dream of a
certain beautiful red wagon with a real seat that she had seen in a
thick catalogue sent her mother by a store in a distant city. So she
never moved till late in the afternoon, when the gentle breeze
strengthened to a sharp wind that, with a petulant gust, whirled her
sailor across the rows and far away.

The flying hat caused a stampede among some curious gophers who were
just then investigating a near-by unplanted row in the hope of finding
more corn. Clattering shrilly, they scudded back to the meadow, and the
little girl rose. After a long chase for the hat, she went stiffly to
work again, not stopping to put on her s