sted it. He made a big fire. He's a
nice boy, only--only he won't say anything."

Again Landor's eyes made the circle, halted at the intrepid brown waif
who, that first word of greeting spoken, had silently stared him back.

"You're sure you don't know anything more, baby? You didn't hear
anything until the boy came?"

"No, Uncle Billy. I was asleep. When I woke up it was dark, and I was
hungry and--and--" At last it had come: the spattering, turbulent tear
storm. Her small body shook, her arms clasped tighter and tighter. "Oh,
Uncle Billy, I want my papa and mamma. I tried to find them, and I
couldn't. Please find them for me, Uncle Billy, Please! Please!"

* * * * *

It was well past midnight. The big full moon, high now in the sky, cast
their shadows almost about their feet when, their labour complete, the
party took up the homeward trail. But there were twenty no longer. At
their head as before rode Landor, in his arms not a rifle but a blanket;
a blanket from which as they journeyed on came now and anon a sound
that was alien indeed: the sobs of a baby girl who wept as she slept.
Back of him, likewise as when they had come, rode hatchet-faced Crosby;
but he, too, was not as before. His saddle had been removed and, in
front of him, astride the horse's bare back, warmed by the animal heat,
was a brown waif of a boy; not asleep or even drowsy, but wide awake
indeed, silently watchful as a prairie owl of every movement about him,
every low-spoken word. What whim of satirist chance had put him there,
what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know,
could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew
only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal. Slowly now,
weary to death with the long, long day, depressed with the inevitable
reaction from the excitement of the past hours, they moved away, to the
south, to the west. In front of them, glittering in the moonlight,
seemingly infinite, stretched the waves of the rolling prairie, bare as
the sea in a calm. Behind them, growing lesser and lesser minute by
minute, merging into the infinite white, were three black dots like tiny
boats on the horizon's edge. On they went, a half mile, a mile, looked
behind; and, with an awe no familiarity could prevent, faced ahead anew.
Back of them now as well as before, uniformly endless, uniformly
magnificent, stretched that giant ocean: silent, sere