y shook his head.

"No--I hope not."

"But you do have prairie fires?"

"Sometimes; but not so often nowadays--though I've seen some bad ones,
in my time."

There was a long silence. All eyes were turned toward the west. Above, a
riot of rose and gold and purple flamed across the sky. Below, more
softly, the colors seemed almost repeated in the waving, shifting,
changing expanse of fairylike loveliness that the prairie had become.

"Oh, how beautiful it all is, and how I do love it," breathed Genevieve,
after a time, as if to herself.

Gradually the gorgeous rose and gold and purple changed, softened, and
faded quite away. The slender crescent of the moon appeared, and one by
one the stars showed in the darkening sky.

"It's all so quiet, so wonderfully quiet," sighed Cordelia; then,
abruptly, she cried: "Why, what's that?"

There had sounded a far-away shout, then another, nearer. On the breeze
was borne the muffled tread of hundreds of hoofs. A dog began to bark
lustily.

* * * * *

Later, they swept into view--a troop of cowboys, and a thronging,
jostling mass of cattle.

"On the way to a round-up, probably," explained Mr. Hartley, as he rose
to his feet and went to meet the foreman, who was coming toward the
house.

Still later, he explained more fully.

"They've put them in our pens for the night. The boys have gone into
camp a mile or so away."

Genevieve shuddered.

"I hate round-ups," she cried passionately.

"What are round-ups?" asked Bertha Brown.

"Where they brand the cattle," answered Genevieve, quickly, but in a low
voice.

Cordelia, who was near her, shuddered. She seemed now to see before her
eyes that seething mass of heads and horns, sweeping on and on
unceasingly.

Cordelia had two dreams that night. She wondered, afterward, which was
the worse. She dreamed, first, that an endless stream of cattle climbed
the windmill tower and jumped clear to the edge of the prairie, where
the sun went down. She dreamed, secondly, that she was very hungry, and
that twenty feet away stood a table laden with hot biscuits and fried
chicken; but that the only way she could obtain any food was to "rope
it" with Reddy's lariat. At the time of waking up she had not obtained
so much as one biscuit or a chicken wing.

CHAPTER X

CORDELIA GOES TO CHURCH

"We're going to have church to-morrow," Genevieve had announced on the
first Saturday night at the ranc