e of a ticket to Omaha. When told, she turned away
to count her money. Among the men were traders and frontiersmen
going to Missouri River markets with buffalo robes; trappers from the
Big Horn country with furs; Mormon elders on their way from Utah to
their Eastern settlements; soldiers on furlough and men from the
railroad-construction camps on the front; adventurers, disgusted with
the hardships of frontier life, and gamblers and desperadoes,
restless and always moving.

Bucks needed his wits to watch the money that was pushed under his
little wicket and to make change without mistake. There was elbowing
and contention and bad language, but the troublesome crowd was
finally disposed of, and when the last of the line had left the ticket
window the waiting-room was pretty well cleared. There remained only a
black-bearded man half-asleep in a chair by the stove, and in one
corner on a bench the woman, who was trying to quiet the child she
held in her lap.

CHAPTER II

As Bucks looked through his embrasure to see if all had been served,
his eye fell on the group in the corner and he heard the woman
suppressing the sobbing of her little girl. He walked out into the
waiting-room to ask what the trouble was. He learned afterward that
she was the wife of a gambler, but she told him only that she had
followed her husband to Medicine Bend and was now trying to get back
with her two children to her parents in Iowa. When she had ascertained
the price of the railroad ticket she found that she lacked five
dollars of the sum needed to make up the fare. Bucks had just a little
money of his own, but he had counted on using that for his meals.
While he was debating what to do, the elder child tugging still at the
mother's dress asked for something to eat, and while the mother tried
to quiet it Bucks felt he could manage somehow without the price of
the ticket better than this woman could.

"Give me what money you have," he said. "I will get you a ticket."

"But isn't the train gone?"

"No."

The black-bearded man dozing near the stove had his ears open although
his eyes were closed. He had heard fragments of the talk and saw the
boy dig into his own pocket, as he would have expressed it, to start
the woman home. After Bucks had given her the ticket and she was
trying to thank him and to quiet again the tired child, the drowsy man
rose, picked up the woman's hand-bag and told her gruffly he would put
her on the train.