hire them
for rides of inspection over the lands which were soon to be apportioned
by lot. A trifle farther along stood a little church, its unglazed
windows black and hollow, like gouged-out eyes. Mrs. Reed drew a vast
amount of comfort from the church, and their proximity to it, knowing
nothing of its history nor its present uses. Its presence there was
proof to her that all Comanche was not a waste of iniquity.

Almost directly in front of their tent the road branched--one prong
running to Meander, the county Seat, sixty miles away; the other to the
Big Horn Valley. The scarred stagecoaches which had come down from the
seventies were still in use on both routes, the two on the Meander line
being reenforced by democrat wagons when there was an overflow of
business, as frequently happened in those prosperous times.

Every morning the company assembled before the tent under the canvas
spread to protect the cookstove, to watch Mrs. Reed and Sergeant
Schaefer get breakfast, and to offer suggestions about the fire, and
admire June at her toast-making--the one branch of domestic art, aside
from fudge, which she had mastered. About that time the stage would
pass, setting out on its dusty run to Meander, and everybody on it and
in it would wave, everybody in the genial company before the tent would
wave back, and all of the adventurers on both sides would feel quite
primitive, in spite of the snuffling of the locomotive at the railway
station, pushing around freight-cars.

The locomotive seemed to tell them that they should not be deceived,
that all of this crude setting was a sham and a pretense, and that they
had not yet outrun the conveniences of modern life.

Dr. Slavens appeared to be getting the upper hand of his melancholy, and
to be drawing the comfort from his black pipe that it was designed to
give. Next to the sergeant he was the handiest man in the camp, showing
by his readiness to turn a full hand at anything, from paring potatoes
to making a fire, that he had shifted for himself before that day. The
ladies all admired him, as they always admire a man who has a little
cloud of the mysterious about him. Mrs. Reed wondered, audibly, in the
presence of June and Miss Horton, if he had deserted his wife.

The others were full of the excitement of their novel situation, and
drunk on the blue skies which strained the sunlight of its mists and
motes, pouring it down like a baptismal blessing. Even William Bentley,
t