resemblance to the tar-paper shack without creature comforts; nor had we
counted on the desolation of prairie on which we were marooned.

Before darkness should shut us in, we hurriedly scrambled through our
provisions for a can of kerosene. Down in the trunk was a small lamp. We
got it out and filled it. And then we faced each other, speechless, each
knowing the other's fear--afraid to voice it. Matches! They had not been
on our list. I fumbled hastily through the old box cupboard with its few
dust-covered odds and ends. Back in a corner was an old tobacco can.
Something rattled lightly as I picked it up--matches!

We were too weary to light a fire. On a trunk which we used as a table,
we spread a cold lunch, tried to swallow a few bites and gave it up. The
empty space and the black night had swallowed us up.

"We might as well go to bed," said Ida Mary dully.

"We'll start back home in the morning," I declared, "as soon as it is
daylight."

* * * * *

Oddly enough, we had never questioned the impulse which led two young
city girls to go alone into unsettled land, homesteading. Our people had
been pioneers, always among those who pushed back the frontier. The
Ammonses had come up from Tennessee into Illinois in the early days and
cleared the timberland along the Mississippi Valley some forty miles out
of St. Louis. They built their houses of the hand-hewn logs and became
land and stock owners. They were not sturdy pioneers, but they were
tenacious.

Some of them went on into what Grandma Ammons called the Santa Fe
Bottoms, a low marshy country along the river, where they became
wealthy--or well-to-do, at least--by fattening droves of hogs on acorns.
Generally speaking, my mother's family ran to professions, and my
father's family to land. Though there was father's cousin, Jack Hunter,
who had been west and when he came to visit us now and then told wild
tales about the frontier to which my sister and I as little children
listened wide-eyed. He wove glowing accounts of the range country where
he was going to make a million dollars raising cattle. Cousin Jack
always talked big.

It was from his highly colored yarns that we had learned all we knew of
the West--and from the western magazines which pictured it as an
exciting place where people were mostly engaged in shooting one another.

While Ida Mary and I were still very young our mother died, and after
that we divided our time