ting mired here, for this country is unsettled and we must be
twenty miles from another human being."

Kate again removed her shoes and stockings and puddled about that
creek until she found a safe fording place. I am afraid I must admit
that I laughed most heartlessly at the spectacle she presented while
so employed.

"Oh, for a camera, Kate!" I said, between spasms.

Kate grinned. "I don't care what I look like," she said, "but I feel
wretchedly unpleasant. This water is simply swarming with wigglers."

"Goodness, what are they?" I exclaimed.

"Oh, they're tiny little things like leeches," responded Kate. "I
believe they develop into mosquitoes later on, bad 'cess to them. What
Mr. Nash would call my pedal extremities are simply being devoured by
the brutes. Ugh! I believe the bottom of this creek is all soft mud.
We may have to drive--no, as I'm a living, wiggler-haunted human
being, here's firm bottom. Hurrah, Phil, we're all right!"

In a few minutes we were past the creek and bowling merrily on our
way. We had a beautiful camping ground that night--a fairylike little
slope of white poplars with a blue lake at its foot. When the sun went
down a milk-white mist hung over the prairie, with a young moon
kissing it. We boiled some slices of our jumping deer and ate them in
the open around a cheery camp-fire. Then we sought our humble couches,
where we slept the sleep of just people who had been driving over the
prairie all day. Once in the night I wakened. It was very dark. The
unearthly stillness of a great prairie was all around me. In that vast
silence Kate's soft breathing at my side seemed an intrusion of sound
where no sound should be.

"Philippa Blair, can you believe it's yourself?" I said mentally.
"Here you are, lying on a brush bed on a western prairie in the middle
of the night, at least twenty miles from any human being except
another frail creature of your own sex. Yet you're not even
frightened. You are very comfy and composed, and you're going right to
sleep again."

And right to sleep again I went.

* * * * *

Our fifth day began ominously. We had made an early start and had
driven about six miles when the calamity occurred. Kate turned a
corner too sharply, to avoid a big boulder; there was a heart-breaking
sound.

"The tongue of the wagon is broken," cried Kate in dismay. All too
surely it was. We looked at each other blankly.

"What can we do?" I said.