light before. For the first time since she had been in
camp, she had noticed that she was treated with respect. It was a rare
sensation, new and most delightful. The hump on her back was barely
noticed as she passed Limber Tim trying to lean up against the fence,
and entered with a noiseless step, and almost tip-toe, the home of the
sufferer.

The men respected this woman now more than ever before. They also
respected her silence. At another time they would have called out to
her; sent banter after her in rough unhewn speech, and got in return as
good, or better, than they sent. But now no man spoke to her. She had
been dignified, sanctified, by her mission of mercy, whatever it meant
or whatever was the matter, and she was to them a better woman. Men who
met her on her return gave her all the trail, and held their hats as she
passed. One old man gave her his hand as she crossed a little snow
stream in the trail, and helped her over it as if she had been his own
child. Yet this old man had despised her and all her kind the day
before.

She went and came many times that day, and always with the same respect,
the same silent regard from the great Missourians whom the day found
about the Forks.

Then Captain Tommy came forth in the evening, and also went on straight
to her cabin, and her face was full of concern. The Captain had not been
a person of any dignity at all the day before, but now not a man had the
audacity to address her as she passed on with her eyes fixed on the
trail before her.

When she returned, the man at his post had fallen. Poor Limber Tim! He
would not leave his station, and Sandy had something else to think of
now; and so he fell on the field.

It was not that he had drunk so much, but that he had eaten so little.
His last recollections of that day were a long and protracted and
fruitless wrestle with the phial of wrath in his boot-leg, and an
ineffectual attempt to screw the picket fence on to his back.

It was no new thing to find a man spilt out in the trail in these days,
and his fall excited no remark.

They would carry men in out of the night and away from the wolves, or
else would sit down and camp by them till they were able to care for
themselves.

A man took a leg under each arm, another man took hold of his shoulders,
and Limber Tim, now the limpest thing dead or alive was borne to his
cabin.

One--two--three days. The camp, that at first was excited almost beyond
bounds, had