l of men. She looked out over the wide wind-swept plains, along the
big chutes full of bellowing beeves, at the wide corral with its scores
of saddled Nemeses, and she was calm and happy. It was a goodly world.

It was upon one day that Mother Daly looked out upon her world; upon
the next day she looked again, and all the world was changed. Far as
the eye could reach, the long and dusty roadway of the cows lay silent,
with its dust unstirred. Far, very far off, there was approaching a
little band of strange, small, bleating, woolly creatures, to whose
driver Mother Daly refused bed and board. The cattle chutes were
silent, the corral was empty. At the Cottage bar the keeper had at
last found a key to the door. Up and down the Trail, east and west of
the Trail, all was quiet, bare, and desolate. At some signal--some
signal written on the sky--all the old life of Ellisville had taken up
its journey into a farther land, into another day. The cowman, the
railroad man, and the gambling man had gone, leaving behind them the
wide and well-perforated Cottage, the graveyard with its double street,
the cattle chutes with well-worn, hairy walls.

Now there came upon the face of the country faint scars where wheels
had cut into the hard soil, these vagrant indices of travel not
pointing all one way, and not cut deep, as was the royal highway of the
cattle, but crossing, tangling, sometimes blending into main-travelled
roads, though more often straying aimlessly off over the prairie to end
at the homestead of some farmer. The smokes arose more numerously over
the country, and the low houses of the settlers were seen here and
there on either hand by those who drove out over the winding wagon ways
in search of land. These new houses were dark and low and brown, with
the exception that each few miles the traveller might see a small frame
house painted white. Sometimes, in the early morning, there might be
seen wandering toward these small white houses, no man knew whence,
small groups of little beings never before seen upon the range. At
nightfall they wandered back again. Sometimes, though rarely, they
needed to turn aside from the straight line to go about the corner of a
fence. Sometimes within such fences there might be seen others of
these dirty, bleating creatures which Mother Daly hated. Here and
there over the country were broken rows of little yellow, faded trees
struggling up out of the hard earth. The untiri