piano out there that winter and Ida Mary bought a heating
stove for the front room. "The Ammons girls are riding high," some of
the settlers said good-naturedly. But when the stove, the cheapest
listed in the mail-order catalog, arrived, Ida Mary cried with
disappointment and then began to laugh. It was so small we could not
tell whether it was a round heater or a bulge in the stovepipe. With it
the temperature of the room ran automatically from roasting to freezing
point unless one kept stoking in fuel.

In some ways Ida Mary and I remained objects of curiosity. Occasionally
we saw indications of it. There had been a hot Sunday afternoon during
the summer when Ida Mary and I were sitting in the open door of the
shack. A strange cowboy rode up to the door. "Is this the place where
the newspaper and everything is?"

We told him that it was. He threw one leg over the saddlehorn and fanned
himself with his sombrero, looking us over, gaudy in a red and black
checkered shirt, fringed leather chaps and bright green neckerchief.

"Well, you ain't the ones I heard about that's runnin' it, are you?" He
seemed puzzled.

Yes, we were the ones. Anything he wanted?

"No. I'm a new wrangler over on Bad Horse creek--I come from Montana.
Montana Joe, they call me. And a bunch of the punchers was just a
wondering what you looked like; wanted me to come over and find out," he
admitted candidly.

"But," and he stared disapprovingly at our slippered feet, "them don't
look like range hoofs to me. They look like Ramblin' Rosie's." Ramblin'
Rosie, it appeared, was a notorious dance-hall girl.

And about that time a Chicago newspaper came out, carrying a big
headline story, complete with drawings, about our adventures in taming
the frontier. It pictured Ida Mary and me with chaps and six-shooters;
running claim-jumpers off our land and fighting Indians practically
single-handed, plowing the land in overalls, two large, buxom, hardy
girls. In fact, it had us shooting and tearing up the West in general. A
friend sent us a copy and we laughed over it hysterically, marveling at
this transformation of two girls who were both as timid as field mice,
into amazons. We hid it quickly so that no one could see it, and forgot
about it until long afterwards.

But we weren't the only girls on the plains with problems. A surprising
number of homesteaders were girls who had come alone. They had a
purpose in being there. With the proceeds of a homest