se in my ear.
"The latchkey of the Circle V is on the outside. If you girls will come
over, I'll move out. If you need me or Hop-Along, all I have is at your
service. You're a good Indian, Edith."

Sometimes I envy the women who are able, during a catastrophe, to stop
and grieve over it. I never seem to have had the time. There was always
something that demanded to be done, whatever the circumstances.

The fire had no sooner been put out, the claim bare as the day I first
saw it--save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the
smell of smoke--when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled
in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had
gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We
were never destined to be back-trailers.

The sultry, tragic day came to a close, with the plains light long after
the sun had gone down, and the Ammons settlement gone, and a devastating
sense of emptiness. Ida Mary and I realized that we had no place to go.
With typical frontier hospitality, every home on the reservation was
open to us; but that night we longed to be alone. It wasn't
commiseration we needed, but quiet in which to grasp what had happened
to us. We decided on Margaret's shack, left vacant when she had proved
up. She had left a few household essentials there.

There some of the frontier women followed us, to bathe and salve the
burns we had forgotten, bandaging those which were the worst. I had
suffered most when my clothing caught fire, but miraculously there were
no serious burns.

They left us alone as night came, Ma and Pa Wagor, Ida Mary and me. It
was Ma who roused first from the general lethargy in which we were all
steeped. She began bustling around. "Guess we'd better have something to
eat," she said briskly.

"There's nothing left to eat," Ida Mary reminded her.

Triumphantly, Ma brought forth a big bundle tied up in her old gingham
apron. In it were cans of salmon, tomatoes and other essential foods.
And a can of pineapple, Ma's panacea for all ills! "I knew we'd be
hungry after all that, so I jerked up a little stuff while you were
getting the papers out."

She brought in an armful of prairie hay, built a fire in the cookstove
and made strong tea. She was no longer the clinging vine of an hour
before.

And there in the little shack down the draw, penniless, almost naked,
all our belongings and our plans for the future in charred ashes o