inter quarantine," the girls would announce as they rode up.

Late in the evening we brought in the ladder, opened up the small square
hole in the ceiling, and our guests ascended to the attic. On the floor
next to the hole was a mattress made of clean, sweet, prairie hay. Our
guest climbed the ladder, sat on the edge of the mattress, feet dangling
down through the cubbyhole until she undressed, and then tumbled over
onto the bed. The attic was entirely too low to attempt a standing
posture.

On one such night with three girls stowed away in the attic, we lay in
bed singing.

"Hello, hello there," came an urgent call.

We peered through the frosted window, trying to see through the driving
snow, and made out a man on horseback.

"I'm on my way to Ft. Pierre and I am lost! I am trying to reach the
Cedar Creek settlement for the night."

"You can't make it, stranger, if you don't know the country," Ida Mary
called out.

"Well, what have I struck?" he asked, perplexed.

"A trading post."

"A trading post! It sounded like an opera house."

"We don't know who you are," Ida Mary called through the thin wall of
the shack, "but you can't get on tonight in this snow. Tie your horse in
the hayshed and we will fix you a bed in the store."

Next morning the girls rolled down the ladder one at a time, clothes in
hand, to dress by the toy stove while Ida Mary and I started the wheels
of industry rolling. When breakfast was ready we called in our strange
guest.

When he asked for his bill we told him we were not running public
lodgings but that we took in strangers when it was dangerous for them to
go on.

After that Ida Mary always left a lamp burning low in the kitchen
window, and the little print shop, set on the high tableland, served as
a beacon for travelers who were lost on the plains.

Many a night stranded strangers sought shelter at the Ammons settlement.
No other trading center in the middle of a reservation was run by girls,
so strangers took it for granted that there were men about, or if they
knew we were alone they did not think of our being unarmed in that
country where guns had been the law.

Once we decided we should have a watchdog around. Ida Mary traded a
bright scarf and some cigarettes for two Indian mongrels. They were lean
and lopeared and starved. The only way they ever would halt an intruder
was by his falling down over them, not knowing they were there. And they
swallowed food like allig