It was something to look forward to when the blizzards shut us off from
the world.

[Illustration]

V

NO PLACE FOR CLINGING VINES

The settlers of the McClure district went on with their work as though
there had never been a land opening. The men fed their stock and hauled
fuel for winter, while the women tacked comforters and sewed and patched
heavy clothing.

Ida Mary went on with her school work and I continued to wrestle with
the newspaper. We put a little shed back of the shack where we could set
buckets of coal and keep the water can handy. With the postcard money we
bought a drum for the stovepipe, to serve as an oven. One either baked
his own bread or did without it.

Huey Dunn did some late fall plowing. "What are you plowing your land
for now, with winter coming?" neighbors asked.

"For oats next spring," Huey replied; "if the damn threshing machine
gets around to thresh out the oatstack in time to sow 'em."

The homesteaders shook their heads. There was no figuring out when Huey
Dunn would do things. This time he was far ahead of them. They did not
know that fall plowing, to mellow and absorb the moisture from winter
snow and spring rain, was the way to conquer the virgin soil. They had
to find it out through hard experience. Fallowing, Huey called it.

Lasso said, "The range is no place for clingin' vines, 'cause there
hain't nothin' to cling to." Ida Mary, under that quiet manner of hers,
had always been self-reliant, and I was learning not to cling.

I lived in the print shop a great deal of the time that winter--an
unusually open winter, barring a few blizzards and deep snows. I slept
on a rickety cot in one corner of the room, cooking my meals on the
monkey stove; and often I ate over at Randall's, who served meals for a
quarter to anyone who cared to stop, the table filled with steaming
dishes of well-cooked food. I liked to take the midday meal there, and
meet people coming through on the stage. They furnished most of the news
for the McClure _Press_.

Driving back and forth from print shop to claim on Pinto was like
crossing the desert on a camel. Pinto was too lazy to trot uphill and
too stiff to trot down, and as the country was rough and rolling, there
was not much of the trail on which we could make any time. He could have
jogged up a little, but he was too stubborn. He had lived with the
Indians too long.

That old pony had a sly, artful eye and a way of shaking his he