e buffalo and elk have
gone. Even the prairie chickens are seen but seldom. Almost no game is
found upon our plains, and not much back in the hills. Many of our young
men till the soil. Some have been to the Carlisle School and have taken
up professions or are teachers. The Osage people are no longer warlike.
But some of our young men volunteered for this white man's war."

"I know that," sad Ruth warmly. "I saw some of them over there in
France--at least, some Indian volunteers. Captain Cameron worked in the
Intelligence Service with some of them. That is the spy service, you
know. The Indians were just as good scouts in France and Belgium as they
were on their own plains."

"We are always the same. It is only white men who change," declared
Wonota with confidence. "The redman is never two-faced or two-tongued."

"Well," grumbled Jennie, afterward, "what answer was there to make to
that? She has her own opinion of Lo, the poor Indian, and it would be
impossible to shake it."

"Who wants to shake it?" demanded Helen. "Maybe she is right, at that!"

The thing about Wonota that "gave the fidgets" to Jennie and Helen was
the fact that she could sit for mile after mile, while the train rocked
over the rails, beading moccasins and other wearing apparel, and with
scarcely a glance out of the car window. Towns, villages, rivers,
plains, woods and hills, swept by in green and brown panorama, and
seemed to interest Wonota not at all. It was only when the train, after
they changed at Denver, began to climb into the Rockies that the Indian
maid grew interested.

The Osage Indians had always been a plains' tribe. The rugged and
white-capped heights interested Wonota because they were strange to
her. Here, too, were primeval forests visible from the windows of the
car. Hemlock and spruce in black masses clothed the mountainsides, while
bare-limbed groves of other wood filled the valleys and the sweeps of
the hills.

Years before Ruth and her two chums had been through this country in
going to "Silver Ranch," but the charm of its mysterious gorges, its
tottering cliffs, its deep canyons where the dashing waters flowed, and
the generally rugged aspect of all nature, did not fail now to awe them.
Wonota was not alone in gazing, enthralled, at the landscape which was
here revealed.

Two days of this journey amid the mountains, and the train slowed down
at Clearwater, where the special car was sidetracked. Although the
station