g more nor less than an old prairie-schooner.

It startled me, when I first caught sight of it. But its acquisition
was not so miraculous as it might have seemed. Dinky-Dunk, who is a
born dickerer, has been trading some of his ranch-stock for town-lots
on the outskirts of Buckhorn. On the back of one of these lots stood a
tumble-down wooden building, and hidden away in this building was the
prairie-schooner. Something about it had caught his fancy, so he had
insisted that it be included in the deal. And home he brought it, with
Tithonus and Tumble-Weed yoked to its antique tongue and his own
Stetsoned figure high on the driving seat. They had told Dinky-Dunk it
wasn't a really-truly authentic prairie-schooner, since practically
all of the trekking north of the Fiftieth Parallel has been done by
means of the Red River cart. But Dinky-Dunk, after looking more
carefully over the heavy-timbered running-gear and the cumbersome
iron-work, and discovering even the sturdy hooks under its belly from
which the pails and pots of earlier travelers must have hung,
concluded that it was one of the genuine old-timers, one of the
"Murphies" once driven by a "bull-whacker" and drawn by "wheelers" and
"pointers." Where it originally came from, Heaven only knows. But it
had been used, five years before, for a centenary procession in the
provincial capital and had emerged into the open again last summer for
a town-booming _Rodeo_ twenty miles down the steel from Buckhorn. It
looked like the dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History,
with every vestige of its tarpaulin top gone. But Whinnie has already
sewed together a canvas covering for its weather-beaten old roof-ribs,
and has put clean wheat-straw in its box-bottom, so that it makes a
kingly place for my two kiddies to play. I even spotted Dinkie,
enthroned high on the big driving-seat, with a broken binder-whip in
his hand, imagining he was one of the original Forty-Niners pioneering
along the unknown frontiers of an unknown land. I could see him duck
at imaginary arrows and frenziedly defend his family from imaginary
Sioux with an imaginary musket. And I stood beside it this morning,
dreaming of the adventures it must have lumbered through, of the
freight it must have carried and the hopes it must have ferried as it
once crawled westward along the floor of the world, from water-hole to
lonely water-hole. I've been wondering if certain perforations in its
side-boards can be b