ss about his ears, hiding his face, but he appeared to have an
hospitable heart in spite of the cheerlessness of his pursuit. Coming to
the road a little before the traveler reached the point of conjunction,
he drew the team to a stand, waiting his approach.

"Have a ride?" the freighter invited, edging over on the backless spring
seat as he spoke, making room.

The bone-wagon driver was a hollow-framed man, who looked as if he had
starved with the country but endured past all bounds of hardship and
discouragement. He looked hungry--hungry for food, hungry for change,
hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his
stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his
skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on
his broken seat, sagging forward with forearms across his thighs.

"Footin' it over to Ascalon?" he asked, as the traveler mounted beside
him.

"Yes sir, I'm headin' that way."

"Come fur?"

"Well, yes," thoughtfully, as if he considered what might be counted far
in that land of unobstructed horizons, "I have come a considerable
little stretch."

"I thought maybe you was one of them new settlers in here, goin' over to
Ascalon to ketch the train," the bone man ventured, putting his inquiry
for further particulars as politely as he knew how.

"I'm not a settler yet, but I expect to try it here."

"You don't tell me?"

"Yes sir; that's my intention."

"Where you from?"

"Iowa."

The bone man looked his passenger over with interest, from his feet in
their serviceable shoes, to his head under his round-crowned,
wide-brimmed black hat.

"A good many of 'em used to come in here from Ioway and Newbrasky in the
early days," he said. "You never walked plumb from there, did you?"

"I thought of stopping at Buffalo Creek, back fifteen or twenty miles,
but I didn't like the country around there. They told me it was better
at Ascalon, so I just struck out to walk across the loop of the railroad
and take a close look at the land as I went along."

"You must be something of a walker," the bone man marveled.

"I used to follow a walking cultivator across an eighty-acre cornfield,"
the traveler replied.

"Yes, that'll stretch a feller's legs," the bone man admitted,
reminiscently. "Nothing like follerin' a plow to give a man legs and
wind. But they don't mostly walk around in this country; they kind of
suspicion a man when they see him ho