o," he said to the
man who presently greeted him from the open doorway.

"Have you come through Honey Creek settlement?" the latter asked.

"Left there about an hour ago."

"Sorry, mister, but I can't let you come into the house. If you'll move
off a few feet I'll lay some grub on the choppin' block an' up the road
about a half-mile you'll find a barn with some hay in it where you and
your horse can spend the night under cover."

Samson moved away and soon the man brought a package of food and laid it
on the block and ran back to the door.

"I'll lay a piece of silver on the block," Samson called.

"Not a darned cent," the man answered. "I hate like p'ison to turn a
feller away in the night, but we're awful skeered here with children in
the house. Good-by. You can't miss the barn. It's close ag'in' the road."

Samson ate his luncheon in the darkness, as he rode, and presently came
upon the barn and unsaddled and hitched and fed his horse in one end
of it--the beast having drunk his fill at the creek they had lately
forded--and lay down to rest, for the night, with the saddle blanket
beneath him and his coat for a cover. A wind from the north began to wail
and whistle through the cracks in the barn and over its roof bringing
cold weather. Samson's feet and legs had been wet in the crossing so that
he found it difficult to keep warm. He crept to the side of his horse,
which had lain down, and found a degree of comfort in the heat of the
animal. But it was a bad night, at best, with only a moment, now and
then, of a sort of one-eyed sleep in it.

"I've had many a long, hard night but this is the worst of them," Samson
thought.

There's many a bad night in the history of the pioneers, its shadows
falling on lonely, ill-marked roads cut by rivers, creeks and marshes
and strung through unnumbered miles of wild country. Samson was up and
off at daylight in a bitter wind and six inches of snow. It was a kind
of work he would not have undertaken upon any call less commanding than
that of friendship. He reached Chicago at noon having had nothing to eat
that day. There was no such eager, noisy crowd in the streets as he had
seen before. The fever of speculation had passed. Some of the stores
were closed; he counted a score of half-built structures getting
weather-stained inside and out. But there were many people on the main
thoroughfares, among whom were Europeans who had arrived the autumn
before. They were changing bu