As the horses gained the level prairie, their driver laid aside a huge black-snake whip with which he had been soundly whacking them, and looked about. The next moment, Dallas saw him rein in his team and spring to his feet. He was looking toward the shack, and he raised his whip-hand menacingly.
"Look at that! Look at that!" he cried wildly, his voice carrying through the clear air.
All looked where he pointed, and someone in the back of the wagon cursed.
"What d' you call that for luck?" yelled the man, shaking his mittened fist. "If Nick knew that!"
Dallas could not hear the mingled answers of his companion.
"Well, I call it damned——"
A woman reached up and pulled him into his seat. There was another shrill chorus, the man whacked the horses till they reared, and the wagon went rumbling on.
Dallas watched it until it disappeared into the cut at the landing. Then she sank upon a bench. For a long time she sat, dumb and immovable, her eyes on the floor. When, finally, she got up, she felt about her, as if overcome by blindness.
Marylyn had not seen or heard the threatening wagon-driver. Seated comfortably on the robe by the fire, she strung beads and hummed contentedly.
Dallas started toward her—stopped—then moved slowly back to the window, where she took up her watch.
Late that night she sprang from fitful, troubled sleep to hear Simon lowing and moving about restlessly. A few moments afterward, there came a mule's long bray from below the shack, followed by the voice of the section-boss, urging on the team. She found her long cloak and hastened out.
She could not wait for the wagon to stop before calling anxiously to her father. "Did you file?" she asked, walking beside Betty.
Lancaster did not answer, but scolded feebly, as if worn with his long trip. "W'y d' y' fret a man 'fore he c'n git down an' into th' house?" he demanded. "Ah'm plumb fruz t' death, an' hungry."
She helped him over the wheel and through the door. Then she went back and, in feverish haste, stabled the mules. On entering the shack, now dimly lighted by a fire, she did not need to repeat her question. She read the answer in her father's face.
"No use," Lancaster told her, raising wet, tired eyes to hers. "Th' claim was gone 'fore ever we got here—filed on las' July." He lay down, muttering in a delirium of grief and physical weariness.
The fire, made only of dry grass, began to die, the room to darken. Dallas' face shadowed with it. She was thinking of the level quarter that was to have blossomed under her eager hands; that was to have brought comfort to Marylyn and her crippled father. And now the land was gone from them, had never been theirs—they were only squatters.
Any hour, a nameless man—perhaps he who had gone by that day—might descend upon them and——
The bail of a bubbling pot slipped down the bar that held it, and the vessel clattered upon the hearth. She started as if a gun had exploded at her elbow.
CHAPTER III
DALLAS MAKES A FRIEND
"Y-a-a-as," drawled Lancaster, reflectively, gnawing the while at a fresh slab of tobacco, "we jes' nat'ally mavericked this claim."
A fortnight had passed since his return from the land-office. In that time, his fear had slowly vanished, his confidence returned. And he had begun to show streaks of the bravado that, in his stronger days, made him an efficient section-boss. Rosy dreams, even, beset his brain—dreams upon which Marylyn, despising her father's meaner structures (and kept in ignorance of what might, at any moment, raze them), piled many a rainbow palace. For, to the younger girl, certain calico-covered books on the mantel had invested the events of the fortnight just gone with a delightful tinge of romance.
Dallas, however, took a sensible view of their situation. She pointed out that the man who had made an entry for the land would, in all probability, return; and that if he did not, five years, at least, would pass before the railroad reached them. Meanwhile, the quarter-section should be properly filed upon for possession and farmed for a living. Now, as she brushed the hearth clean with the wing of a duck, she listened quietly to her father's confident boasting.
"It's this way, m' gal:" he said—he compassed a goodly quid and shifted it dexterously into the sagging pocket of a cheek—"Inside o' six months after a man files, he's got t' dig a dugout er put up a shanty. He's got t' do a leetle farm-work, an' sleep on his claim. When thet six months is up, ef he ain't done no buildin' er farmin', th' claim's abandoned, an' th' first man comin' along c'n hev it.
"In this case, th' gent in question ain't built, dug er farmed. Ef he was t' show up an' want this quarter, he could git it by payin' fer our improvements. Ah reckon we'd hev t' sell an' pull our freight. But ef he was t' show up an' not pay like a' honest man, they'd—they'd—wal, they'd likely be a leetle disagreement."
Dallas shook her head. "If he comes before his six months is up and improves, we got to go. That would be the only square thing. Ain't it so?"
"Wal—wal——" began Lancaster, lamely.
"It is," she said. "He filed on the quarter, and we had no right to settle——"
"We hev settled, an' th' lan' 's goin' t' be worth money," broke in her father.
She put up her hand. "We got to go, if he comes. But"—she arose wearily—"if he didn't offer pay for our improvements, how could we go, or get through the winter, or build again next spring? Our money's gone."
"Look a-here, Dallas," began her father, crossly, "they ain't no use t' worry th' way you do. Winter is clost. It ain't likely th' man'll come along this late. An' ef he don' show up pretty soon, he ain't got a chanst. 'Cause, when his six months is gone, Ah'll make another trip t' Bismarck, contes' his entry, hev it cancelled an' file. Then, we's safe."
She silenced him, for Marylyn was entering, and quit the shack. Outside, before the warped door, she paused.
"He's always so sure of himself. But he can't do anything. And Marylyn—Oh, I wish there was someone with us, now—someone that'd help us if anything—went wrong."
Of a sudden, looking down at her hands, her eyes fell upon the crimson stripes left across her palms by the plow. And, in fancy, a horseman was riding swiftly toward her from the east, again, while she leaned on the cross-brace and waited.
"Twenty miles," she said thoughtfully; "twenty miles." And turned the marks under.
Sun-baked, deep of rut and straight as the flight of a crow, lay the road that led northeast from the swift, shoally ford of the Missouri to the cattle-camp at Clark's. It began at the rough planking upon which the rickety ferry-boat, wheezing like some asthmatic monster, discharged its load of soldiers or citizens, and ran up through the deep cut in the steep, caving river-bank. From there, over the western end of the Lancaster quarter, across the coulée under a hub-depth of muddy backwater—at the only point where the sumach-grown sides sloped gradually—it took its level, unswerving way.
Twice only in its course did it touch the ravine curving along near by it—once, six miles from the ferry-landing, where, on the limbs of a cluster