mules and horses, she at last set off for
Wisconsin for her preparatory course at Kendrick Hall.

Pickhandle Modock, however, had reckoned without the automobile truck,
which now was fast displacing heavy freight teams. While as yet the
road into the mountains was not in the best shape for trucks, at least
during winter months, still the noisy transporters of freight, of the
lower tonnage capacity, were taking a great deal of business from him.
Then the road on the other side of the mountains, connecting with the
big coast-side cities, was paved; and this ended Pickhandle Modock's
career as a jerkline freighter. The town of Palada, too, degenerated
from an active little supply point to a stagnating desert village, with
no visible means of support, and Pickhandle Modock found himself with a
big stock of goods on hand with no one to buy, and with sixty or more
heavy freight horses eating their heads off in their corrals.

His circumstances went from bad to worse, but he had carefully kept all
this from his adopted daughter, in the preparatory school in the Middle
West. Consequently the blithe and lovable Jerkline Jo knew nothing of
the state of affairs when the telegram announcing her father's death
reached her that fateful morning.

It stunned her at first. She could scarcely believe that lovable,
hard-working, grizzled old Pickhandle Modock, the only father she had
ever known had gone out of her life forever. The justice of the peace
at Palada, who had handled Pickhandle's legal affairs, had sent the
telegram, which advised her to return at once, as she was named as the
sole heir to her foster father's estate. The telegram--a night letter
and a long one--hinted of things of which she had not even dreamed, an
prepared her for financial disappointments.

She at once realized that her school days at Kendrick Hall were ended,
just when the future looked so bright. She would have entered college
next year, and this, too, she must now forego, just when her ambition
was at its height.

But she had been through many discouragements as a gypo queen, and she
did not flinch. She had known poverty--even actual want--had fought
mud and sandstorms and cold and heat and rain that hampered work for
weeks and months. In her was the indomitable spirit of the pioneer.
She bravely and silently packed her treasured belongings, bade a
dry-eyed good-by to her tearful instructors and classmates, and set her
face toward the Wester