S WRATH

It was a crisp day with that tang of frost in the air that makes the old
shiver and the young feel a tingling in the blood. Aunt Alvirah drew her
chair closer to the stove in the sitting-room. She had a capable
housework helper now, and even Jabez Potter made no audible objection,
for Ruth paid the bill, and the dear old woman had time to sit and talk
to "her pretty" as she loved to do.

"Oh, my back and oh, my bones!" she murmured, as she settled into her
rocking-chair. "I am a leetle afraid, my pretty, that you will have your
hands full if you write pictures for red savages to act. It does seem to
me they air dangerous folks to have anything to do with.

"Why, when I was a mite of a girl, I heard my great-grandmother tell
that when she was a girl she went with her folks clean acrosst the
continent--or, leastways, beyond the Mississippi, and they drove in a
big wagon drawed by oxen."

"Goodness! They went in an emigrant train?" cried Ruth.

"Not at all. 'Twarn't no train," objected Aunt Alvirah. "Trains warn't
heard of then. Why, _I_ can remember when the first railroad went
through this part of the country and it cut right through Silas
Bassett's farm. They told him he could go down to the tracks any time he
felt like going to town, wave his hat, and the train would stop for
him."

"Well, wasn't that handy?" cried the girl.

"It sounded good. But Silas didn't have it on paper. First off they did
stop for him if he hailed the train. He didn't go to town more'n three
or four times a year. Then the railroad changed hands. 'There arose up a
new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph'--you know, like it says in
the Bible. And when Silas Bassett waved his hat, the train didn't even
hesitate!"

Ruth laughed, but reminded her that they were talking about her
great-grandmother's adventures in the Indian country years and years
before.

"Yes, that's a fact," said Aunt Alvirah Boggs. "She did have exciting
times. Why, when they was traveling acrosst them Western prairies one
day, what should pop up but a band of Indians, with tall feathers in
their hair, and guns--mebbe bow and arrows, too. Anyway, they scare't
the white people something tremendous," and the old woman nodded
vigorously.

"Well, the neighbors who were traveling together hastened to turn their
wagons so as to make a fortress sort of, of the wagon-bodies, with the
horses and the cattle and the humans in the center. You understand?"

"Yes,"