nt and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a
congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the
bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a
woman's voice.

It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the sounds of men
and life reached forward to meet them--laughter, the neighing of
horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were
returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness
of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they
still longed for.

The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in
which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's
labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring,
the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by
the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this
interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the
twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac. It
shone bright on the darkness of the grass, a cordon of flame that some
kindly magician had drawn about the resting place of the tired camp.

With the night pressing on its edges it was a tiny nucleus of life
dropped down between the immemorial plains and the ancient river. Home
was here in the pitched tents, a hearthstone in the flame lapping on
the singed grass, humanity in the loud welcome that rose to meet the
newcomers. The doctor had known but one member of the Company, its
organizer, a farmer from the Mohawk Valley. But the men, dropping
their ox yokes and water pails, crowded forward, laughing deep-mouthed
greetings from the bush of their beards, and extending hands as hard as
the road they had traveled.

The women were cooking. Like goddesses of the waste places they stood
around the fires, a line of half-defined shapes. Films of smoke blew
across them, obscured and revealed them, and round about them savory
odors rose. Fat spit in the pans, coffee bubbled in blackened pots,
and strips of buffalo meat impaled on sticks sent a dribble of flame to
the heat. The light was strong on their faces, lifted in greeting,
lips smiling, eyes full of friendly curiosity. But they did not move
from their posts for they were women and the men and the children were
waiting to be fed.

Most of them were middle-aged, or the trail had made them look
middle-aged. A few