miles to Brookings' halfway house, as we had guessed.

"And to Bend?" We ask what we already know, perhaps because the woman--a
girlish woman--so evidently would prolong the interruption to her
solitude.

"About one hundred and twenty--a long way!" She smiles, adding, simply,
"John's there."

Small wonder she clutches at us! John has been gone a fortnight, and for
two days she has not even seen the Swansons, her "neighbors" over the
hill, three miles away. Like a ship in the night, we all but passed
her--passed with never a greeting for which her heart hungered, never a
word from the "outside" to break the hard monotony. She is utterly
alone, except for the rabbits and the smiling sky. Her husband is wage
earning. And she sticks by their three hundred and twenty acres and does
what she can with a mattock and a grubbing hoe. They have a well
started, and some fence posts in the ground. Some day, she says, they
will make a home of it.

[Illustration: Irrigation--"First, parched lands of sage; then the flow"

Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis]

[Illustration: Irrigation--"Next, water in a master ditch and countless
man-made rivulets between the furrows"]

"We always dreamed of having a home," she explains a bit dreamily. "But
it never seemed to come any closer on John's wages. So when we read of
getting this land for nothing it seemed best to make the try. But of
course it isn't 'free' at all--we've discovered that. And oh! it costs
so much!"

We commiserate. We would help, and vaguely seek some means.

Help? Yes, gladly she will accept it, says the little woman--but not for
herself. "Good gracious, why should I need it?" Nor have we the heart to
offer reasons. But if we have a mind to be helpful, she continues, there
is a case over in eighteen-eleven--she names the section and
township--where charity could afford a smile. She tells us, then, of a
half-sick woman with three infants, left on the homestead while the
husband goes to town. There, instead of work, he gets drink, and fails
to reappear with provisions. But the woman will not give up the scrap of
land she has set her heart on, and doggedly remains. When the neighbors
find her, she and the children have existed for five days solely on
boiled wheat. "And we needed it so for seeding," is her lament.

Our hostess of the desert stands by the ruts, waving to us through the
dust of our wake, the embodiment of the spirit of pioneering, which
burns to-day