be measured in feet. The sweat trickled down
the horses' necks and legs, their thick winter coats lay slick to their
sides, and their breath came labored from their heaving chests. Two and
sometimes three out of the four were down at a time.

The fight was too unequal; to pit their pygmean strength longer against
the drifts and the fury of the elements was useless. Even Neifkins
finally was convinced of that, and was about to admit as much when,
without warning, wagon, driver and horses went over a cut-bank, where
the animals lay on their backs, a kicking tangled mass.

It was the end. For a second Neifkins stood staring, overwhelmed with
the realization that he was worse off by a good many thousand dollars
than when he had come into the country--that he was wiped
out--broke--and that the thin ice upon which the Security State Bank had
been skating would now let it through.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SHEEP QUEEN

The long mixed train crawling into the stockyards at Omaha, with its
ice-encased wheels, its fringe of icicles pendant from the eaves, and
snow from the wind-swept plains of western Nebraska piled on the roofs,
looked like an Arctic Special.

Kate stood on the rear platform of the swaying caboose looking with
wearied unkindled eyes at the myriad lights of the first city she had
ever seen. Those eyes were dark-circled with fatigue, her face streaked
with soft coal soot, while the wrinkled riding skirt in which she had
slept was soiled and torn. Her fleece-lined canvas coat was buttoned to
the throat, and she leaned negligently against the rail, watching from
under the broad brim of her Stetson the twinkling lights increase.

It had been Kate's intention when she left Prouty to catch a fast
passenger train and meet her sheep at a feeding station a few miles
outside of Omaha, but the violence of the storm had changed her plans
and she had remained to spend many tedious hours waiting on side-tracks,
and this, together with the work of unloading to feed and water, and
insufficient sleep, had brought her as near exhaustion as she ever had
found herself.

There was no eagerness in the sheep woman's face, only the impersonal
curiosity of a spectator at a display in which he had no part. She
accepted as a matter of course the fact that she would be here, as she
was at home, an outsider, an alien.

Kate saw nothing interesting or unusual in what she had done--it was all
in the day's work. She was merely one o