ft word
of their appropriation of the baby girl. Later, when they had reached
their camp site and settled down, Modock, having received no
communication relative to the child, returned on horseback and sought
for the spot where she had been found. At last it was discovered, and
it was quite apparent that during the ten days' interval no one had
been there. The pack bags with the supplies, and the few miners' tools
that lay about, were all but buried in the sands. Modock's note was
still there.

Deciding that the baby's guardians or parents had perished in the
storm, Pickhandle Modock took the articles for the purpose of
identification, if some one ever should claim the child, and returned
with them to his camp, greatly to the joy of motherly Anna Modock, his
wife. Anna Modock had no children, and now she loved the desert waif
as if the child had been her own.

Slowly Pickhandle Modock prospered in the years that followed, for he
was a thrifty, hard-working man. The child, whom they had named
Josepha, grew to girlhood, and reached young womanhood as a sprite of
the camps--a gypo queen. The Modocks were uneducated people, but knew
it, and strove to make amends by educating the girl to the best of
their ability. When the contractor had prospered to the point where he
needed and could afford a bookkeeper, he employed a gray-haired
derelict of the grade, half of whose duties were to educate Josepha.

The old man loved the child and did his best by her, guiding her
successfully through the elementary branches and succeeding in
implanting in her mind what is known as a common-school education. She
learned rapidly, but showed no particular interest in her studies.
With the work of the grade she was enraptured. At ten she was driving
a slip team, loading and dumping without the help of any one. Later
she drove wheeler teams, then snap teams, and even the six-horse plow
teams. She became a wonderful horsewoman, and, when in the West,
entered contests at rodeos in trick riding, riding buckers and
so-called outlaws, and won many prizes. Horses and mules loved her.
Her voice or her hand spoke to them in a language that they seemed to
know. She could break a colt to steady work in half the time required
by any man she had ever met. It was said that the only thing a horse
or mule would not do for her was to talk, whereupon Josepha trained a
colt to "talk," just to prove that her understanding of animals was
virtuall