ody, their mother bravely yielded her
life to a lingering illness.

Many months later, when Evan Lancaster's wounds were at last healed, Ben
and Betty were unhitched from a dirt-laden scraper on the siding and put
before a white-topped prairie-schooner. Then the old section-boss, with
his crutches beside him and his daughters seated in the all but empty
box behind, said a husky farewell to the men crowding around the wagon,
and started the mules along the road that led northward beside the
rails.

He gave no backward glance at the wind-battered house where he had
brought an ailing bride; instead, eager to leave that plain of flying
sand and scanty grasses, he drove the team rapidly forward, bound for a
country where there were wells, and not water-cars, where rain fell
oftener, and where food, both for man and beast, could be gotten easily
from the earth. But Dallas, seated in the schooner's bed, her weeping
sister held soothingly against her breast, watched, dry-eyed, as a
mound by a giant mesquite faded slowly from her sight, and saw her
girlhood's home give way, as a lighthouse sinks behind a speeding
vessel, until only its grey-sprinkled roof showed through the scattered
trees. Then, after pillowing Marylyn's head on a Navajo blanket beside
the swashing water cask, she climbed forward to the driver's seat and
took the reins from her father.

It was April, and when the _mesa_ was left far to rearward, a world
almost forgotten by the crippled section-boss burst in new, green
loveliness upon his desert children. Towering pines and spreading oaks,
lush grass strewn with blossoms, clear-running streams and gay-feathered
birds replaced thirsty vegetation, salt lakes, and hovering vultures.
They travelled slowly, each day bringing some fresh delight to ear and
eye, until one evening in the waning Dakota summer they camped beside a
great crooked split in the prairie, on a flat peninsula made by a
sweeping westward bend of the muddy Missouri.

Across the river from their stopping-place, where an amber sun was going
down, the horizon was near. High bluffs, like a huge wind-break, stood
upon the plain, leaving at their feet only enough space for the
whitewashed frame buildings of Fort Brannon. But to the east, the
paralleling bluffs lay at a distance, and broke their ridge-back far up
the scarlet coulee; from where, southward, stretched a wide gap--ten
broad and gently undulating miles--that ended at the slough-studded bas