ty sore and stiff for a few days," he said as he laid the
mail sack down on the floor; "sorry, miss, I scared your horse," and
touching his ten-gallon hat he was gone.

"Where did _he_ hail from?" Ma Wagor demanded from the store where she
had been watching.

"He's not from Blue Springs, Ma."

"I declare you are as tormentin' as an Indian when it comes to finding
out things," Ma exclaimed in disappointment. She couldn't understand
how I could have ridden any distance with the man without learning all
about his present, guessing at his past, and disposing of his future to
suit myself. People, as Ma frequently pointed out, were made to be
talked to.

Just before sunset one day a week or so later I was sitting in the shop
when the cowboy walked in. "Got to thinkin' you might be hurt worse than
you appeared to be." He said he was top hand, had charge of a roundup
outfit over in the White River country some fifty miles away, and some
of the stock had roamed over on the reservation. Name was Lone
Star--Lone Star Len.

And then one gray, chilly day in November, with the first feathery
snowflakes, he rode up on his cow pony to say good-by. He was leaving
the country, taking a bunch of cattle down to Texas for winter range. He
was glad to be going. "Don't see how folks can live huddled up with
somebody on every quarter-section. Homesteaders is ruinin' the country,
makin' it a tore-up place to live. It's too doggone lonesome with all
this millin' around."

When the Brule became populated, Lone Star Len had gone into the empty
Rosebud country, "where I'm not hemmed in by people, some place where
there's a little room." Now he would be driven on--and on. And in the
spring there would be a new influx of people in our section of the
frontier.

Meanwhile, fall had come. The plains, which had stretched to the horizon
that spring untouched by a plow, unoccupied by white men, were now
unrecognizable. A hundred thousand acres of fertile waste land had been
haltered. Hundreds of settlers had transplanted their roots into this
soil and had made it a thriving dominion. Fall rains filled the dams and
creeks. There were potatoes and other vegetables in abundance.

Think of it! Caves full of melons, small but sweet. _The Wand_ told of
one small field that yielded twenty bushels of wheat, another twenty-two
bushels of oats, to the acre. There was fall plowing of more ground,
schools being established, Sunday schools, preparations for t