s knife out with a
click and leaned once more toward her.

The fiddle was playing the opening strains of the supper dance now, and
a hundred voices were singing with it; so the neighbor woman's daughter,
who had been peering from behind the fanning-mill, hurried away to the
house. And thus it came about that no one but a vagrant night-hawk,
perched high on the top of the stack, remained near enough to hear the
sawing sound of a dull knife-blade, making its way through cloth.

* * * * *

IN the early morning hours, as the gray team jogged homeward past the
deserted school-house, the big brothers and their mother discussed the
wedding, the dancing, and the supper. But the little girl, snugly
wrapped in a quilt on the hay behind, lay still and silent, and only
smiled when the night breeze from the west bore to her ear the clear
notes of the departing bugle blowing a sweet retreat.

IX

THE PRICE OF CONVALESCENCE

EVERY morning a cloud appeared in the east, rushed westward across the
northern sky, and vanished beyond the "Jim." Every afternoon it came up
in the west again, swept back toward the east, and went out of sight in
the Big Sioux. If a herd chanced to be grazing too near its path as it
approached, they were scattered right and left in wild confusion by a
shrill _toot_! _toot_! that could be heard at the farm-house. But when
the way was clear the cloud traveled swiftly and silently, stringing
itself, on sunny days, to a low white ribbon, or, if the air was damp
and the heavens were gray, separating itself, from river to river, into
many dark coughs of dense, high-sailing smoke.

For three months it had been crossing the plains as regularly as the sun
itself. Before that it had loitered, attended, so the biggest brother
said, by a great company of rough men carrying shovels and picks. It was
this company, stray members of which, worn and grimy, had visited the
farm-house now and then and talked in broad brogue, that had kept the
little girl and the herd south of the reservation road throughout the
early spring; and it was not until the men had dispersed and the cloud
had begun its daily trips from horizon to horizon that she was permitted
to ride northward on the pinto to see it go by.

The youngest brother went with her, mounted upon a skittish, bald-faced
pony, and they halted together, near the low embankment that divided the
prairie, to wait for the engine. But when