h the
earth from which they came had swallowed them up. Look as he might, the
spectator could catch no glimpse of a moving object, except the
green-brown grass carpet glistening under the afternoon sun.

Yet a moment longer the man stood so; then, his own face as pale as had
been that of coward Hans Mueller, he leaned against the lintel of the
door.

"Yes, we're too late now, Margaret," he echoed.

CHAPTER II

FULFILMENT

The log cabin of Settler Rowland, as a landmark, stood forth. Barred it
was--the white of barked cotton-wood timber alternating with the brown
of earth that filled the spaces between--like the longitudinal stripes
of a prairie gopher or on the back of a bob-white. Long wiry slough
grass, razor-sharp as to blades, pungent under rain, weighted by squares
of tough, native sod, thatched the roof. Sole example of the handiwork
of man, it crowned one of the innumerable rises, too low to be dignified
by the name of hill, that stretched from sky to sky like the miniature
waves on the surface of a shallow lake. Back of it, stretching
northward, a vivid green blot, lay a field of sod corn: the ears already
formed, the ground whitened from the lavishly scattered pollen of the
frayed tassels. In the dooryard itself was a dug well with a mound of
weed-covered clay by its side and a bucket hanging from a pulley over
its mouth. It was deep, for on this upland water was far beneath the
surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a
rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her
meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it
was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the
spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the
long, sultry afternoons.

Otherwise not an excrescence marred the face of nature. The single horse
Rowland owned, useless now while his crop matured, was breaking sod far
to the west on the bank of the Jim River. Not a live thing other than
human moved about the place. With them into this land of silence had
come a mongrel collie. For a solitary month he had stood guard; then one
night, somewhere in the distance, in the east where flowed the Big
Sioux, had sounded the long-drawn-out cry of a timber wolf, alternately
nearer and more remote, again and again. With the coming of morning the
collie was gone. Whether dead or answering the call of the wild they
never knew, nor ev