d not
add that she was in his thoughts when he bought it. "Now I'm going out
to hitch up an' take ye home," he continued. "While I'm gone, ye make up
yer mind which ye want--" He started for the door, but paused half-way.
"--which ye want," he repeated, lowering his voice, "Sultan--er thet
_beautiful_ cane?"

When he was gone the little girl stole closer to the table and gazed
rapturously down. Never in her life, as the cattleman truly said, had
she seen anything like it. No horse, on a prairie overrunning with
horses, could compare with it. She put out her hand and touched its
crooked head, almost reverently, with one small finger.

The cattleman harnessed a span of fat mules at the barn, and led them
into their places on each side of a wagon tongue. All the while he
talked out loud to himself, with occasional guffaws of hearty laughter
and sharp commands to the team. Despite his merriment, however, he
peered back at the shanty uneasily from time to time; so that it was a
full quarter of an hour before the mules were hitched to the
whiffletrees and ready for their journey. Then he climbed to the seat
and circled toward the door.

She was not in sight when he brought up with a loud whoa, and getting
down, the lines in one hand and a black-snake in the other, he advanced
to the sill and looked in. "Any passengers goin' south?" he cried
cheerily, cracking the whip.

"Me," answered a voice from behind the table, and the little girl,
fagged but blissful, came forward smilingly, a long, brown-paper package
clasped tightly to her breast.

X

"BADGY"

IT was the little girl who discovered that the badgers were encroaching
upon the big wheat-field that stretched westward, across the prairie,
from the farm-house to the sandy bank of the Vermillion. In bringing the
cattle home from the meadows one night, along the cow-path that bordered
the northern end of the grain, she allowed several to stray aside into
the field, which was now faintly green with its new sprouting. And as
she headed them out, riding her pony at full gallop, she saw a fine
shorthorn suddenly pitch forward with a bellow and fall. She checked her
horse and waited for the animal to rise again. But it could not--it had
snapped a fore ankle in a freshly dug badger hole.

The shorthorn was a favorite and, as befitted her good blood, carried
across her dewlap the string of silver sleigh-bells that in wintertime
tinkled before the pung. So the news o