d we're going on. You might as well kick against a railroad; and
because the plough and the small farmer will do more for you than even the
locomotive did, they have got to come. Well, now, some of you are keeping
stores, and one or two I see here baking bread and making clothes. Which
is going to do the most for your trade and you, a handful of rich men, who
wouldn't eat or wear the things you have to sell, owning the whole
country, or a family farming on every quarter section? A town ten times
this size wouldn't be much use to them. Well, you've had your
cattle-barons, gentlemen most of them; but even a man of that kind has to
step out of the track and make room when the nation's moving on."

He probably said more, but Grant did not hear him, for he had as
unostentatiously as possible conveyed Muller and the fraeulein into a
wagon, and had horses led up for the Dakota men. They had some difficulty
in mounting, and the crowd laughed good-humouredly, though here and there
a man flung jibes at them; while one, jolting in his saddle as his broncho
reared, turned to Grant with a little deprecatory gesture.

"In our country we mostly drive in wagons, but I'll ride by the stirrup
and get down when nobody sees me," he said. "The beast wouldn't try to
climb out this way if there wasn't something kind of prickly under his
saddle."

Grant's face was a trifle grim when he saw that more of the horses were
inclined to behave similarly, but he flicked his team with the whip, and
there was cheering and derision when, with a drumming of hoofs and rattle
of wheels, wagons and horsemen swept away into the dust-cloud that rolled
about the trail.

"This," he said, "is only a little joke of theirs, and they'll go a good
deal further when they get their blood up. Still, I tried to warn you what
you might expect."

"So!" said Muller, with a placid grin. "It is noding to der franc tireurs.
I was in der chase of Menotti among der Vosges. Also at Paris."

"Well," said Grant drily, "I'm 'most afraid that by and by you'll go
through very much the same kind of thing again. What you saw at the depot
is going on wherever the railroad is bringing the farmers in, and we've
got men in this country who'd make first-grade franc tireurs."

IV

MULLER STANDS FAST

The windows of Fremont homestead were open wide, and Larry Grant sat by
one of them in a state of quiet contentment after a long day's ride.
Outside, the prairie, fading from gr