y day and
mosquitoes by night became almost unbearable. The sun blistered us, the
night froze us. Still not a sign of any white-topped wagon from the
east, nor any dust-cloud of troopers from the west served to break the
monotony of the shimmering waste that lay about us on every hand. We
were growing gaunt now and haggard; but still we lay, waiting for our
men to grow strong enough to travel, or to lose all strength and so be
laid away.

We had no touch with the civilization of the outer world. At that time
the first threads of the white man's occupancy were just beginning to
cross the midway deserts. Near by our camp ran the recently erected line
of telegraph, its shining cedar poles, stripped of their bark, offering
wonder for savage and civilized man alike, for hundreds of miles across
an uninhabited country. We could see the poles rubbed smooth at their
base by the shoulders of the buffalo. Here and there a little tuft of
hair clung to some untrimmed knot. High up in some of the naked poles we
could see still sticking, the iron shod arrows of contemptuous
tribesmen, who had thus sought to assail the "great medicine" of the
white man. We heard the wires above us humming mysteriously in the wind,
but if they bore messages east or west, we might not read them, nor
might we send any message of our own.

At times old Auberry growled at this new feature of the landscape. "That
was not here when I first came West," he said, "and I don't like its
looks. The old ways were good enough. Now they are even talkin' of
runnin' a railroad up the valley--as though horses couldn't carry in
everything the West needs or bring out everything the East may want. No,
the old ways were good enough for me."

Orme smiled at the old man.

"None the less," said he, "you will see the day before long, when not
one railroad, but many, will cross these plains. As for the telegraph,
if only we had a way of tapping these wires, we might find it extremely
useful to us all right now."

"The old ways were good enough," insisted Auberry. "As fur telegraphin',
it ain't new on these plains. The Injuns could always telegraph, and
they didn't need no poles nor wires. The Sioux may be at both ends of
this bend, for all we know. They may have cleaned up all the wagons
coming west. They have planned for a general wipin' out of the whites,
and you can be plumb certain that what has happened here is knowed all
acrost this country to-day, clean to the big b