were very old. Susan saw a face carved with
seventy years of wrinkles mumbling in the framing folds of a shawl.
Nearby, sitting on the dropped tongue of a wagon, a girl of perhaps
sixteen, sat ruminant, nursing a baby. Children were everywhere,
helping, fighting, rolling on the grass. Babies lay on spread blankets
with older babies sitting by to watch. It was the woman's hour. The
day's march was over, but the intimate domestic toil was at its height.
The home makers were concentrated upon their share of the
activities--cooking food, making the shelter habitable, putting their
young to bed.

Separated from Susan by a pile of scarlet embers stood a young girl, a
large spoon in her hand. The light shot upward along the front of her
body, painting with an even red glow her breast, her chin, the under
side of her nose and finally transforming into a coppery cloud the
bright confusion of her hair. She smiled across the fire and said:

"I'm glad you've come. We've been watching for you ever since we
struck the Platte. There aren't any girls in the train. I and my
sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there," with a nod in
the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, "and she's married."

The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise
her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan's eye a face
more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was
evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding
finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to
hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already
well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily
sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the
self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider,
even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.

"Lucy'll be real glad to have a friend," she said. "She's lonesome.
Turn the bacon, Lucy, it makes my back ache to bend"; and as the sister
bowed over the frying pan, "move, children, you're in the way."

This was directed to two children who lay on the grass by the fire,
with blinking eyes, already half asleep. As they did not immediately
obey she assisted them with a large foot, clad in a man's shoe. The
movement though peremptory was not rough. It had something of the
quality of the mother tiger's admonishing pats to her cubs, a certain
gentlene