ening water. We didn't even bother to keep it clean. The routine of
our life had been burned away. The handful of dishes went dirty, the
floor went unswept. But Ma brought milk and custards that she had made
at home, I drank the juice of dried fruits, and Imbert brought us water
from the Millers' well. We sank jars of it deep into the ground to keep
cool.

Heine broke a new trail across the plains and a few days after the fire
the horses came home. They had wandered back to the old site, snorted at
the black ruins, and gone thundering across the prairie led by Lakota
with the wild horse's fear of fire. We never expected to see them again.
But one day they saw Sam Frye coming with the mail. They followed him
down the draw, and when he stopped and threw out the mail sack Lakota
gave a loud neigh and walked straight into Margaret's old barn. Where
the mail sacks went was home to Lakota.

Moving the post office around the prairie, piling the mail in an open
box in the corner, may have been criminally illegal, but we gave it no
thought.

The mail, in a haphazard fashion, was being handled. Our next problem
was the proof notices. They must go on. It was vital to the settlers.
Many of them could not live without the money they were borrowing on the
final proofs. Without the press there seemed no solution to that
problem.

On the sixth day after the fire Ida Mary got up early, while I slept in
the cool of the morning; she made a blast from the dry grass under one
cap of the stove, boiled coffee, ate her lean breakfast, and put food on
a chair beside my bed. Then she darkened the room, slipped out, saddled
Lakota, rode up to the cave, and brought out the mail sack of legal
papers we had saved from the fire. She took out the notices--those in
course of publication and others due to be published. Then she rode on
to McClure, made arrangements with the printer of the McClure _Press_,
and began setting up the notices.

When the stage came in that noon with the Ammons mail, there was a
letter from E. L. Senn, the proof king, offering us the use of the shop
and part-time service of his printer to meet the emergency. Although we
had cornered the great proof business on the Lower Brule, he was coming
to our rescue to save it for us.

That night Ida Mary came home, hot, weary, with lines of fatigue in her
youthful face and about her blue eyes. But there was a resolute look,
too, marking her strong will; and in her voice a tone of