ey were segregated
in the damper sections where the soil had not yet dried out after the
rain, I concluded they had been bred in the ground.

* * * * *

Our need for money had become acute, but before we were quite desperate
a ray of hope appeared. There were quite a few children scattered over
the neighborhood, and the homesteaders decided that there must be a
school in the center of the district.

The directors found that Ida Mary had taught school a term or two back
east, and teachers were scarce as hens' teeth out there, so she got the
school at $25 a month. The little schoolhouse was built close to the far
end of our claim, which was a mile long instead of half a mile square as
it should have been.

We had just finished breakfast one morning when Huey Dunn and another
homesteader drove up to the door with their teams, dragging some heavy
timbers along.

Huey stood in the door, his old straw hat in hand, with that placid
expression on his smooth features. A man of medium height, shoulders
slightly rounded; rather gaunt in the middle where the suspenders
hitched onto the overalls.

"Came to move your shack," he said in an offhand tone.

"Move it?" we demanded. "Where?"

"To the other end of the claim, over by the schoolhouse. And that's as
far as I'm goin' to move you until you prove up," he added. He hadn't
moved us off the land when we wanted to go. He would move us up to the
line now, but not an inch over it until we had our patent.

The men stuck the timbers under the shack, hitched the horses to it, and
Ida Mary and I did the housework en route. Suddenly she laughed: "If we
had been trying to get Huey Dunn to move this shack he wouldn't have got
to it all winter."

When they set us down on the proper location they tied the shack down by
driving stakes two or three feet into the ground, then running wire
cords, like clothesline, from the roof of the shack down to the stakes.

"Just luck there hasn't been much wind or this drygoods box would have
been turned end over end," Huey said. "Wasn't staked at all."

It was autumn and the air was cold early in the mornings and sweet with
the smell of new-mown hay. We hired a homesteader who had a mower to put
up hay for us and had a frame made of poles for a small barn and stacked
the hay on top around it, against the winter. Most of the settlers first
covered this frame with woven wire to keep the stock from eating into
the ha