't let that girl break
you all up too. We are all fools, but some can get over it quicker
than others.

If that little bow-legged thing gets under your feet or abuses her,
jest get your toe under him and hoist him over into the alley.

Good-bye and good luck, old man.

BERT.

And the next day the doubly bereaved man started on his lonely journey
back to the Dakota claim, back to an empty house, with a gnawing pain
in his heart and a constriction like an iron band about his throat;
back to his broad fields to plod to and fro alone.

As he began to realize it all and to think how terrible was this loss,
he laid his head down on the car-seat before him and cried. His first
great trial had come to him, and meeting it like a man, he must now
weep like a woman.

CHAPTER XIII.

FLAXEN'S GREAT NEED.

Flaxen wrote occasionally, during the next year, letters all too short
and too far between for the lonely man toiling away on his brown farm.
These letters were very much alike, telling mainly of how happy she
was, and of what she was going to do by and by, on Christmas or
Thanksgiving. Once she sent a photograph of herself and husband, and
Anson, after studying it for a long time, took a pair of shears and cut
the husband off, and threw him into the fire.

"That fellow gives me the ague," he muttered.

Bert did not write, and there was hardly a night that Ans lay down on
his bed that he did not wonder where his chum was, especially as the
winter came on unusually severe, reminding him of that first winter in
the Territory. Day after day he spent alone in his house, going out
only to feed the cattle or to get the mail. The sad wind was always in
his ears. But with the passage of time the pain in his heart lost its
intensity.

One day he got a letter from Flaxen that startled and puzzled him. It
was like a cry for help, somehow.

"Dear old pap, I wish you was here," and then in another place came the
piteous cry, "Oh, I wish I had some folks!"

All night long that cry rang in the man's head with a wailing, falling
cadence like the note of a lost little prairie-chicken.

"I wonder what that whelp has been doin' now. If he's begun to abuse
her I'll wring his neck. She wants me an' da'sn't ask me to come. Poor
chick, I'll be pap an' mam to ye, both," he said at last, with sudden
resolution.

The day after the receipt of this letter a telegram was handed to him
at the post-office, whi