saw nothing but long grass
waving in the summer winds, and yellow sunflowers--miles and miles of
sunflowers. Polly grew very tired of the hot sun blazing down on the
close-covered wagon, and of the dust raised by the long wagon-train.

About this time she remembers that her father bought her a little
Indian pony, and from that happy day the child rode beside the wagon,
and could keep out of the dusty trail, or ride a little way off on the
prairie, if she liked. The pony carried double very well, so a small
sister or brother was often lifted on behind for a ride. One night
the Indians, who were always prowling round and coming as near the
wagon-train as they dared, frightened the horses and got away with ten
of them. All the women and children cried, Polly says, for they were
afraid the redskins would come back and kill them. In the morning
Polly's father and some of the men found the Indians' trail and
tracked them to a wooded canon. The hungry thieves had killed one
horse and were so busy feasting on it that the white men surprised
them and shot all the Indians but two or three. The lost horses and
Polly's pony whinnied to their masters from a thicket, where they were
tied, and were taken back to camp.

On and on over the great plains of Wyoming the wagons carried these
emigrants. Many found the trip grow tiresome, while the oxen and mules
would often lie down in their traces and refuse to go any farther. A
few days' rest, and the rich bunch-grass to crop soon set the stock
all right, and the white-topped wagons crawled ahead again. Soon the
emigrants saw blue, hazy mountains, far off at first, then nearer and
nearer, till at last their road led through a pass between the peaks.

Then Polly remembers riding through Utah, with its queer red cliffs
and high rocks carved in strange shapes by winds and weather; the
stretches of sandy desert; and beyond those, grassy meadows and
streams fringed with green willows. After a while Great Salt Lake lay
sparkling in the sun and looking cool and blue. All around it were
alkali deserts or wide plains, hot and dusty and white with salt or
soda. The "prairie schooners," with their covers faded and burnt by
the sun, went very slowly over these desert wastes, Polly thought,
and Nevada, with its dusty gray sage-brush land on either side of the
road, seemed not much better.

"Papa's little woman" had her hands full now; for her mother was so
ill she seldom left the wagon. All the co