fellow frontiersman, who said to Folsom, "You are throwing yourself and
your money away, John. There's nothing in those gold stones, there's
nothing in that yawp about the machine shops; all those yarns were
started by U. P. fellows with corner lots to sell. The bottom will drop
out of that place inside of a year and leave you stranded."

All the same had Folsom bought big blocks and built his home there. It
was the nearest town of promise to Hal Folsom's wild but beautiful home
in the hills, and, almost as he loved Nell, his bonny daughter, did the
old trader love his stalwart son. Born a wild Westerner, reared among
the Sioux with only Indians or army boys for playmates, and precious
little choice in point of savagery between them, Hal had grown up a
natural horseman with a love for and knowledge of the animal that is
accorded to few. His ambition in life was to own a stock farm. All the
education he had in the world he owed to the kindness of loving-hearted
army women at Laramie, women who befriended him when well-nigh
broken-hearted by his mother's death. Early he had pitched his tent on
the very spot for a ranchman's homestead, early he had fallen in love
with an army girl, who married the strapping frontiersman and was now
the proud mistress of the new and promising stock farm nestling in the
valley of the Laramie, a devoted wife and mother. The weekly stage to
the railway was the event of their placid days except when some of the
officers and ladies would come from either of the neighboring posts and
spend a week with her and Hal. From being a delicate, consumptive child,
Mrs. Hal had developed into a buxom woman with exuberant health and
spirits. Life to her might have some little monotony, but few cares;
many placid joys, but only one great dread--Indians. John Folsom, her
fond father-in-law, was a man all Indians trusted and most of them
loved. Hal Folsom, her husband, had many a trusted and devoted friend
among the Sioux, but he had also enemies, and Indian enmity, like Indian
love, dies hard. As boy he had sometimes triumphed in games and sports
over the champions of the villages. As youth he had more than once found
favor in the dark eyes that looked coldly on fiercer, fonder claimants,
and one girl of the Ogallallas had turned from her kith and kin, spurned
more than one red lover to seek the young trader when he left the
reservation to build his own nest in the Medicine Bow, and they told a
story as pathet