y unlimited.

So Joshepha Modock grew to young womanhood, admired, loved, and spoiled
by the thousands of nomad laborers who knew her. At eighteen she could
truthfully boast of a hundred proposals of marriage, and some of them
had been worth an ambitious girl's consideration. Gypo Jo they called
her, and she was known all over the West, where her foster father's
operations were confined, and stories of her beauty and horsewomanship
had gone East and North and South, for railroad-construction laborers
are a nomadic brood and repeat their tales and traditions from coast to
coast.

Then Pickhandle Modock, whose wife had died some years before, made the
move which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin.
Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor of
consequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents and
implements, he decided to change his activities to those of a freighter.

Numerous railroad projects were being launched in the West, and most of
the lines were bound to extend through countries difficult to access.
Contractors preferred to have their freight hauled to them by regular
freighters, so that every team of their own could be put on the task of
railroad building. Or so Pickhandle Modock reasoned.

Accordingly he sold his construction outfit, and with the proceeds
bought heavy freight wagons and heavy young teams, and launched forth
in his new career. For a year or more he followed railroad camps with
his heavy freight outfit; then he suddenly decided that he was getting
too old for camp life and to be eternally moving about. So when a new
gold mine was opened up in the mountains that overlook southern
California's desert, he moved into the little frontier town of Palada,
forty miles from the new mines, and got the freighting contract from
this railroad point up into the mountains.

He bought out the town's largest store, and set up a blacksmith and
wagoner's shop to keep his great wagons in repair and his hard-working
teams shod. Here for a year or more Josepha attended high school
during the winter months, and drove eight and ten-horse teams with a
jerkline to the mines in summer, and acquired her new title of Jerkline
Jo because of her skill in training and handling the big teams. Here,
too, she required [Transcriber's note: acquired?] her thirst for an
education, and, torn between her new ambition and her love for the big
outdoors and her devoted