er.

She put up her hand. "We got to go, if he comes. But"--she arose
wearily--"if he didn't offer pay for our improvements, how _could_ we
go, or get through the winter, or build again next spring? Our money's
gone."

"Look a-here, Dallas," began her father, crossly, "they ain't no use t'
worry th' way you do. Winter is clost. It ain't likely th' man'll come
along this late. An' ef he don' show up pretty soon, he ain't got a
chanst. 'Cause, when his six months is gone, Ah'll make another trip t'
Bismarck, contes' his entry, hev it cancelled an' file. _Then_, we's
safe."

She silenced him, for Marylyn was entering, and quit the shack. Outside,
before the warped door, she paused.

"He's always so sure of himself. But he can't do anything. And
Marylyn--Oh, I _wish_ there was someone with us, now--someone that'd
help us if anything--went wrong."

Of a sudden, looking down at her hands, her eyes fell upon the crimson
stripes left across her palms by the plow. And, in fancy, a horseman was
riding swiftly toward her from the east, again, while she leaned on the
cross-brace and waited.

"Twenty miles," she said thoughtfully; "twenty miles." And turned the
marks under.

* * * * *

Sun-baked, deep of rut and straight as the flight of a crow, lay the
road that led northeast from the swift, shoally ford of the Missouri to
the cattle-camp at Clark's. It began at the rough planking upon which
the rickety ferry-boat, wheezing like some asthmatic monster, discharged
its load of soldiers or citizens, and ran up through the deep cut in the
steep, caving river-bank. From there, over the western end of the
Lancaster quarter, across the coulee under a hub-depth of muddy
backwater--at the only point where the sumach-grown sides sloped
gradually--it took its level, unswerving way.

Twice only in its course did it touch the ravine curving along near by
it--once, six miles from the ferry-landing, where, on the limbs of a
cluster of giant cottonwoods that grew in the bottom of the gully, a
score of Indian dead were lashed, their tobacco-pipes, jerked beef and
guns under the blanket wrappings that hid them; and, again, at Murphy's
Throat, four miles farther up, where the coulee narrowed until a man,
standing in its bed with arms outstretched, could place the tips of his
fingers against either rocky wall. Beyond the Throat, the crack in the
plains grew wider and shallower, veered out to the eastward, and