d contentedly back to the store, unheeding the
pools beneath his feet.

V

NOVEMBER

September and October passed before the surveyors, long looked for, came
through, and three months dragged out their slow length before the
pre-emptors could file and escape from their claims.

By the first of November the wonder had gone out of the life of the
settlers. One by one the novelties and beauties of the plain had passed
away or grown familiar. The plover and blackbird fell silent. The
prairie-chicken's piping cry ceased as the flocks grew toward maturity,
and the lark and cricket alone possessed the russet plain, which seemed
to snap and crackle in the midnight frost, and to wither away in the
bright midday sun.

Many of the squatters by this time had spent their last dollar, and
there was little work for them to do. Each man, like his neighbor, was
waiting to "prove up." They had all lived on canned beans and crackers
since March, and they now faced three months more of this fare. Some of
them had no fuel, and winter was rapidly approaching.

The vast, treeless level, so alluring in May and June, had become an
oppressive weight to those most sensitive to the weather, and as the air
grew chill and the skies overcast, the women turned with apprehensive
faces to the untracked northwest, out of which the winds swept
pitilessly cold and keen. The land of the straddle-bug was gray and sad.

One day a cold rain mixed with sleet came on, and when the sun set,
partly clear, the Coteaux to the west rose like a marble wall,
crenelated and shadowed in violet, radiant as the bulwarks of some
celestial city; but it made the thoughtful husband look keenly at the
thin walls of his cabin and wonder where his fuel was to come from. In
this unsheltered land, where coal was high and doctors far away, winter
was a dreaded enemy.

The depopulation of the newly claimed land began. Some of the girls went
back never to return; others settled in Boomtown, with intent to visit
their claims once a month through the winter; but a few, like the
Burkes, remained in their little shanties, which looked still more like
dens when sodded to the eaves. The Clayton girls flitted away to
Wheatland, leaving the plain desolately lonely to Bailey. One by one the
huts grew smokeless and silent, until at last the only English-speaking
woman within three miles was old Mrs. Bussy, who swore and smoked a
pipe, and talked like a man with bronchitis. She