ng we wanted to sell them
when they got their government allowances. While their money lasted they
had no sales resistance whatever.

This characteristic apparently wasn't peculiar to the Brule Indians, but
was equally true of those in the Oklahoma reservation who boomed the
luxury trades when oil was discovered on their land. There it was no
uncommon sight to see a gaudy limousine parked outside a tepee and a
grand piano on the ground inside.

But what the Indians didn't buy of these foods at forbidden costs we ate
ourselves, cutting seriously into our profits. And when Mrs.
Christopherson sent her little Heine over one day with a bucket of green
beans we almost foundered as animals do with the first taste of green
feed after a winter of dry hay.

We had a few rows of garden east of our shack. I remember gathering
something out of it--lettuce and onions, probably, which grew abundantly
without any care.

It was hot, and everybody on the Strip, worn out from strenuous weeks,
slowed down. The plains were covered with roses, wild roses trying to
push their heads above the tall grass. The people who had worked so
frantically, building houses, putting in crops, walked more slowly now,
stopped to talk and rest a little, and sit in the shade. They discovered
how tired they were, and the devitalizing heat added to the general
torpor.

"It's this confusement," Ma Wagor said, "that's wore everybody out." She
was the only one on the Strip to continue at the same energetic pace.
"There ain't a bit of use wearing yourself out, trying to do the things
here the Almighty Himself hasn't got around to yet--flying right in the
face of the Lord, I says to myself sometimes."

But in spite of the heat and the general weariness, the work was
unrelenting. The mail must be delivered regularly. The paper must be
printed. One day Ida Mary's voice burst in upon the clicking of type.

"What are we going to do about the rattlesnakes?" she said tragically;
"they're taking the country."

She was right. They were taking the reservation. They wriggled through
the tall grass making ribbon waves as they went. They coiled like a
rubber hose along the trails, crawled up to the very doors, stopped
there only by right-fitting screens.

One never picked up an object without first investigating with a board
or stick lest there be a snake under it. It became such an obsession
that if anyone did pick up something without finding a snake under it he
f