different matter. They enjoyed
it. If they were losing their significance as man in the aggregate,
the tamer, and master, they were gaining a new importance as distinct
and separate units. Convention no longer pressed on them. What law
there was they carried with them, bore it before them into the
wilderness like the Ark of the Covenant. But nobody wanted to be
unlawful. There was no temptation to be so. Envy, hatred and malice
and all uncharitableness had been left behind in the cities. They were
a very cheerful company, suffering a little from fatigue, and with now
and then a faint brush of bad temper to put leaven into the dough.

There was a Biblical simplicity in their life. They had gone back to
the era when man was a nomad, at night pitching his tent by the water
hole, and sleeping on skins beside the fire. When the sun rose over
the rim of the prairie the camp was astir. When the stars came out in
the deep blue night they sat by the cone of embers, not saying much,
for in the open, spoken words lose their force and the human creature
becomes a silent animal.

Each day's march was a slow, dogged, progression, broken by fierce work
at the fords. The dawn was the beautiful time when the dew was caught
in frosted webs on the grass. The wings of the morning were theirs as
they rode over the long green swells where the dog roses grew and the
leaves of the sage palpitated to silver like a woman's body quivering
to the brushing of a beloved hand. Sometimes they walked, dipped into
hollows where the wattled huts of the Indians edged a creek, noted the
passage of earlier trains in the cropped grass at the spring mouth and
the circles of dead fires.

In the afternoons it grew hot. The train, deliberate and determined as
a tortoise, moved through a shimmer of light. The drone of insect
voices rose in a sleepy chorus and the men drowsed in the wagons. Even
the buoyant life of the young girl seemed to feel the stupefying weight
of the prairie's deep repose. She rode at a foot pace, her hat hanging
by its strings to the pommel, her hair pushed back from her beaded
forehead, not bothering about her curls now.

Then came the wild blaze of the sunset and the pitching of the camp,
and after supper the rest by the fire with pipe smoke in the air, and
overhead the blossoming of the stars.

They were wonderful stars, troops and troops of them, dust of myriad,
unnumbered worlds, and the white lights of great, b