ow in the
water and so closely packed that he could almost have stepped from one
shaggy head to another. Not fifty yards from him they scrambled ashore
and went lumbering into the hazy dusk. Something had frightened them
and they were on a stampede. Even the river had not stopped their
flight. The earth shook with their tread as they found their stride.

That wild flight into the gathering darkness was symbolic, Morse
fancied. The vast herds were vanishing never to return. Were they
galloping into the Happy Hunting Ground the Indians prayed for? What
would come of their flight? When the plains knew them no more, how
would the Sioux and the Blackfeet and the Piegans live? Would the
Lonesome Lands become even more desolate than they were now?

"I wonder," he murmured aloud.

It is certain that he could have had no vision of the empire soon to
be built out of the desert by himself and men of his stamp. Not even
dimly could he have conceived a picture of the endless wheat-fields
that would stretch across the plains, of the farmers who would pour
into the North by hundreds of thousands, of the cities which would
rise in the sand hills as a monument to man's restless push of
progress and his indomitable hope. No living man's imagination had yet
dreamed of the transformation of this _terra incognita_ into one of
the world's great granaries.

The smoke of the traders' camp-fire was curling up and drifting away
into thin veils of film before the sun showed over the horizon hills.
The bull-teams had taken up their steady forward push while the quails
were still flying to and from their morning water-holes.

"Whoop-Up by noon," Barney predicted.

"Yes, by noon," Tom Morse agreed. "In time for a real sure-enough
dinner with potatoes and beans and green stuff."

"Y' bet yore boots, an' honest to gosh gravy," added Brad Stearns,
a thin and wrinkled little man whose leathery face and bright eyes
defied the encroachment of time. He was bald, except for a fringe of
grayish hair above the temples and a few long locks carefully disposed
over his shiny crown. But nobody could have looked at him and called
him old.

They were to be disappointed.

The teams struck the dusty road that terminated at the fort and
were plodding along it to the crackling accompaniment of the long
bull-whips.

"Soon now," Morse shouted to Stearns.

The little man nodded. "Mebbe they'll have green corn on the cob.
Betcha the price of the dinner they