ecifying medicines and herbs.
I ain't saying you didn't get it from me, and knowing you do get from
me all I got, is what makes me hone for them books. You must say
'dragged.' The Injuns DRAGGED you from one village to another." He
paused meditatively, muttering the word to himself, while Lahoma ran
away to catch the pony. When she came back, leading it by the mane, he
said, "I've been a-weighing that word, Lahoma, and it don't seem to me
that 'dragged' sounds proper. It don't seem no sort of word to use in
a parlor. What do you think? DRAGGED! How does that strike you?"

"I don't like the sound of it, neither," said Lahoma, shaking her head.
"I think DRUG is softer. It kinder melts in the ear, and DRAGGED
sticks."

"Well, don't use neither one till I can find out." Presently he was
swinging along across the plain toward the southwestern range while the
girl kept close beside him on the pony. Their talk was incessant,
voicing the soul of good comradeship, and but for the difference
between heavy bass and fluty soprano, a listener might have supposed
himself overhearing a conversation between two Brick Willocks.

There was nothing about the second range of the Wichita Mountains to
distinguish it from the one farthest toward the northeast except a
precipice at its extremity, rising a sheer three or four hundred feet
above the level plain. Beyond this lofty termination, the mountain
curved inward, leaving a wide grassy cove open toward the south; and
within this half-circle was the settler's dugout.

The unprotected aspect of that little home was in itself an eloquent
commentary on the wonderful changes that had come about during the last
seventeen years. The oval tract of one million five hundred thousand
acres lying between Red River and its fork, named Greer County, and
claimed by Texas, was in miniature a reproduction of the early history
of America. Until 1860 it had not even borne a name, and since then it
had possessed no settled abodes. Here bands of Indians of various
tribes had come and gone at will, and here the Indians of the Plains,
after horrible deeds of depredation, massacre and reprisal, had found
shelter among its mountains. The country lay at the southwest corner
of Indian Territory for which the Indians had exchanged their lands in
other parts of the United States on the guarantee that the government
would "forever secure to them and their heirs the country so exchanged
with them."