ators. Van Leshout named them "Eat" and
"Sleep." In indignation Ida Mary returned them to their owners. What was
the matter, they wanted to know. "No barkum, no bitem," Ida Mary
explained, and she tied them firmly to the back of the first Indian
wagon headed for the Indian settlement and gave up the idea of a dog for
protection.

However, women were probably safer in the homestead section than in any
other part of the country. Women had been scarce there, and they met
with invariable respect wherever they went; it was practically unheard
of for a solitary woman to be molested in any fashion.

Both men and women came through the Strip that winter looking for
friends or relatives who had claims, or in quest of land. Often they
could get no farther than the print shop by nightfall. And never was any
such person refused food or shelter.

Ida Mary went around that winter with one of the city boys, though she
still saw Imbert. "We take each other too much for granted," she said.
"I've been dependent upon him for companionship and diversion and help
in many ways. For his sake and mine I must know that it's more than
that."

I cannot recall that we ever planned ahead of proving up on the claim.
We measured life by proving-up time. Only the dirt farmers planned
ahead. And Ma Wagor--who was an inveterate matchmaker. I can see her
now, driving across the plains, holding her head as high as that of the
spotted pony she drove--a pony which, though blind as a bat, held its
head in the air like a giraffe.

Often she would stay with us at night. "Pa won't mind. He's got plenty
of biscuit left," she would say; "the cow give two gallons of milk
today, and he's got _The Wand_ and the Blue Springs paper to read--"

But sometimes, when business had kept her from home for two or three
days, or we needed her, she would gaze out of the window, watching for
him.

And it got colder. Getting the mail back and forth to the stage line
became a major problem. "It appears to me," said Ma, "like a post office
is as pestiferous a job as a newspaper." But Ma never admitted anything
pestiferous about running the store.

The post office receipts picked up. Mail bags were jammed with letters
written by the settlers through long, lonely evenings. The profits
helped to pull us through as the newspaper business slumped to almost
nothing during the "holing-in" period. The financial operations of the
trading post, in fact, rose and fell like a Wall St