rder, as it usually was when it was needed.

Mr. Randall called his sons. "You'll have to go for Doc Newman.... Yes,
I know it's a bad trip. But you boys know how to take care of
yourselves. Make it--if you can." And they rode hell-for-leather.

It seemed to me there never was a time when at least one of the Randalls
wasn't riding horseback over the prairie with an urgent message or
errand for the homesteaders. Pay? Hell, no! Weren't these newcomers
funny!

I remember one evening in January with a storm raging. I had run to the
Randalls' house from the print shop. They sent the sleigh to pick up Ida
Mary and Wilomene. By dark half a dozen men were marooned at the Halfway
House, three of them strangers passing through, three of them plainsmen
unable to get home. A little later two homestead women, who had come in
from Pierre on the stage and could not go on, joined us.

Somehow there was room for all of them in the big, bare-floored living
room. Chairs with an odd assortment of calico-covered cushions were
scattered over the room. Crude, old-fashioned tables were set here and
there, each with a coal-oil lamp. By the light from the brightly
polished chimneys some read newspapers more than a week old, others
looked hungrily through the mail-order catalogs which always piled up in
country post offices. And Wilomene White, telling some of her homestead
anecdotes, filled the room with laughter. Her most harassing experiences
seemed funny to Wilomene.

In the middle of the room the big heating stove, stoked with coal, grew
red hot as the wind howled and whistled down the chimney and the snow
lashed against the windows of the old log house.

Opening off one end of the long room were the small cubicles that served
as bedrooms where the women guests would sleep, crowded together, two or
three in a bed. Cots would be put up in the living room for the Randall
young ones. But the strangers? Leave that to the Randalls--always room
for a few more.

"Do you know," said Mr. Randall, "I am never happier than on a night
like this, sitting around the fire, knowing my family are all here and
safe; and that strangers from out of the storm have found shelter under
my roof."

When the weather grew milder and I could ride back and forth again
almost daily, it was Mr. Randall who had one of the boys on the ranch
wrangle me a range pony which, he said, was "broke" to ride. He _was_
broke to ride. The only difficulty was to mount him. It