d inspiration of all enterprise in that new place.
People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of
them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder
his aptness in answering everything.

Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big, brave talk to Dr.
Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a
better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number,
she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition
of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.

It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see
some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the
seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no
money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect
Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means,
slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in
the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them
aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which
he is afraid.

In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced
all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans,
dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the
doctor's guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted
by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a
house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there
never had been one which could be properly called such.

Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern
states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the
liberty, would lay hold of her at such times with rude power, making her
feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped
buttes and ramparts of riven stone.

Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she
remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great
lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty
horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle
that lay ahead.

Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.

"You've got to keep your nerve," he advised, bluntly kind, "and not let
the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton."

"The lonesomene