re plain and
sky converge, and when the first day's journey was done, and he had
staked out and cared for his horse, he watched with fascinated eyes
the strange and striking picture limned against the black hills and the
sweeping stretch of darkening prairie. Everything was animation; the
bullwhackers unhitching and disposing of their teams, the herders
staking out the cattle, and--not the least interesting--the mess cooks
preparing the evening meal at the crackling camp-fires, with the huge,
canvas-covered wagons encircling them like ghostly sentinels; the ponies
and oxen blinking stupidly as the flames stampeded the shadows in
which they were enveloped; and more weird than all, the buckskin-clad
bullwhackers, squatted around the fire, their beards glowing red in its
light, their faces drawn in strange black and yellow lines, while the
spiked grasses shot tall and sword-like over them.

It was wonderful--that first night of the "boy extra."

But Will discovered that life on the plains is not all a supper
under the stars when the sparks fly upward; it has its hardships and
privations. There were days, as the wagons dragged their slow lengths
along, when the clouds obscured the sky and the wind whistled dismally;
days when torrents fell and swelled the streams that must be crossed,
and when the mud lay ankle-deep; days when the cattle stampeded, and the
round-up meant long, extra hours of heavy work; and, hardest but most
needed work of all, the eternal vigil 'gainst an Indian attack.

Will did not share the anxiety of his companions. To him a brush with
Indians would prove that boyhood's dreams sometimes come true, and
in imagination he anticipated the glory of a first encounter with the
"noble red man," after the fashion of the heroes in the hair-lifting
Western tales he had read. He was soon to learn, as many another has
learned, that the Indian of real Life is vastly different from the
Indian of fiction. He refuses to "bite the dust" at sight of a paleface,
and a dozen of them have been known to hold their own against as many
white men.

Some twenty miles west of Fort Kearny a halt was made for dinner at the
bank of a creek that emptied into the Platte River. No signs of
Indians had been observed, and there was no thought of special danger.
Nevertheless, three men were constantly on guard. Many of the trainmen
were asleep under the wagons while waiting dinner, and Will was watching
the maneuvers of the cook in hi