nyes, in the form of a swarm of mosquitoes, attacked
us lying in our boat. The weary Kid rolled and swore till dawn, when a
light wind sprang up _astern_. We hoisted our sail, and for one whole
day cruised merrily, making sixty miles by sunset. This took us to the
town of Mobridge.

I was charmed with the novelty of driving our old enemy in harness. So,
letting the Kid go to sleep forward under the sail, I cruised on into
the night. The wind had fallen somewhat, but it kept the canvas filled.
The crooning of the water, the rustling of the sail, the thin voices of
bugs on shore, and the guttural song of the frogs, shocking the general
quiet--these sounds only intensified the weird calm of the night. The
sky was cloudless, and the moon shone so brightly that I wrote my day's
notes by its glow.

The winking lights of Mobridge slowly dropped astern and faded into the
glimmering mist.

Lonely seamen all the night
Sail astonished amid stars.

The remembered lines gave me the divine itch for quoting verses. I did
so, until the poor tired Kid swore drowsily in his sleep under the mast.
The air was of that invigorating coolness that makes you think of cider
in its sociable stage of incipient snappiness. Sleepy dogs bayed far
away. Lone trees approached me, the motion seeming to belong to them
rather than to me, and drifted slowly past--austere spectral figures.
Somewhere about midnight I fell asleep and was awakened by a flapping
sail and a groaning mast, to find myself sprawling over the wheel. The
wind had changed; it was once more blowing up-stream, and a drizzling
rain was driving through the gloom. During my sleep the boat had gone
ashore. I moored her to a drift log, lowered sail, flung a tarp over us,
and went to sleep again. And the morning came--blanketed with gray
oozing fog. The greater part of that day we rowed on in the rain without
a covering. In the evening we reached Forest City, an odd little old
town, looking wistfully across stream at the youthful red and white
government buildings of the Cheyenne Agency.

[Illustration: THE YANKTON LANDING IN THE OLD DAYS.]

[Illustration: "ATOM II" LANDING AT SIOUX CITY.]

Despite its name, this town is utterly treeless! I once knew a
particularly awkward, homely, and freckled young lady named "Lily." The
circumstance always seemed grimly humorous to me, and I remembered it as
we strolled through the town that couldn't live up to its name.

We were ravenous