r shack then. Its arrival stressed our
general disillusionment.

We had now seen the inside of a few shacks over the prairie. The
attempts the women had made to convert them into homes were pitiful,
although some of them had really accomplished wonders with practically
nothing. It is pretty hard to crush the average woman's home-making
instinct. The very grimness of the prairie increased their determination
to raise a bulwark against it.

Up to now we had been uneasy guests in the shack, ready for flight
whenever Huey Dunn got around to taking us back to Pierre. But trying to
dig out a few things now and then from grips and trunks without
unpacking from top to bottom is an unsatisfactory procedure. So we
unpacked.

Then we had to find a place for our things and thought we might as well
try to make the cabin more comfortable at the same time, even if we
weren't staying. We looked about us. There wasn't much to work with. In
the walls of our shack the boards ran up and down with a 2 x 4 scantling
midway between floor and ceiling running all the way around the room.
This piece of lumber served two purposes. It held the shack together and
served as a catch-all for everything from toilet articles to hammer and
nails. The room had been lined with patches of building paper, some red,
some blue, and finished out with old newspapers.

The patchwork lining had become torn in long cracks where the boards of
the shack were split, and through the holes the dry wind drove dust and
sand. The shack would have to be relined, for there was not sufficient
protection from the weather and we would freeze in the first cold spell.

This regulation shack lining was a great factor in the West's
settlement. We should all have frozen to death without it. It came in
rolls and was hauled out over the plains like ammunition to an army, and
paper factories boomed. There were two kinds--red and blue--and the
color indicated the grade. The red was a thinner, inferior quality and
cost about three dollars a roll, while the heavy blue cost six. Blue
paper on the walls was as much a sign of class on the frontier as blue
blood in Boston. We lined our shack with red.

The floor was full of knotholes, and the boards had shrunk, leaving wide
cracks between. The bachelor homesteader had left it black with grease.
When Huey hauled us an extra keg of water we proceeded to take off at
least a few layers.

We were filling the cracks with putty when a bachel