r damp
forehead, drew the sleeve of her close-fitting jersey across her face
every few moments, and, at last, to aid her in making better progress,
as well as to cool her ankles, brought the bottom of her skirt through
the waistband, front and back, and walked in her red flannel petticoat.
As she travelled, she looked skyward occasionally with a troubled face,
and, resting but seldom, urged the team forward. Clear weather and
sunshine would not long continue, and the first field on the claim must
be turned up and well harrowed before the opening of winter.

"Come, Ben, come," she called coaxingly to the nigh mule. "If you don't
dig in now, how d' you expect to have anything to eat _next_ winter?
Betty, Betty, don't let Ben do it all; I'm talking to you, too. Come
along, come along."

Ben and Betty, lean, and grey with age, bent willingly to their labour
at the sound of her voice. Their harnesses creaked a monotonous
complaint with their renewed efforts, the colter came whining behind
them. As Dallas gently slapped the lines along their backs, now and
then, to emphasise her commands, clouds of dust, which had been gathered
as mud in the buffalo-wallow where they went each evening to roll,
ascended and were blown away. Faithfully they pulled, not even lifting
an eyelid or flapping an ear in protest when Simon, the stray yearling
bull that had adopted the claim as its home and tagged Dallas
everywhere, bellowed about their straining legs or loitered at their
very noses and impeded their way.

Plowing was strange work to the patient mules and to the girl who was
guiding them. To her, the level prairie, rank with goldenrod,
pink-flowered smartweed, and purple aster, was a land of wondrous
growth. For twenty years her home had been an arid _mesa_ far to the
south, where her father captained the caretakers of a spur railroad
track. The most western station-house in Texas, standing amid thorny
mesquite, was her birthplace and that of her sister Marylyn; the grey
plateau across which the embankment led was their playground; there they
grew to womanhood under the careful guidance of their frail,
Northern-born mother.

And then two casualties, coming close upon each other, had suddenly
changed their life. Their father was brought home one night so maimed
and crushed by the wheels of a flat-car that he could never hope to take
up his work again; and while he lay, bandaged and broken, fighting to
keep the soul in his crippled b