That wild flight into the gathering darkness was symbolic, Morse fancied.  The vast herds were vanishing never to return.  Were they galloping into the Happy Hunting Ground the Indians prayed for?  What would come of their flight?  When the plains knew them no more, how would the Sioux and the Blackfeet and the Piegans live?  Would the Lonesome Lands become even more desolate than they were now?

“I wonder,” he murmured aloud.

It is certain that he could have had no vision of the empire soon to be built out of the desert by himself and men of his stamp.  Not even dimly could he have conceived a picture of the endless wheat-fields that would stretch across the plains, of the farmers who would pour into the North by hundreds of thousands, of the cities which would rise in the sand hills as a monument to man’s restless push of progress and his indomitable hope.  No living man’s imagination had yet dreamed of the transformation of this terra incognita into one of the world’s great granaries.

The smoke of the traders’ camp-fire was curling up and drifting away into thin veils of film before the sun showed over the horizon hills.  The bull-teams had taken up their steady forward push while the quails were still flying to and from their morning water-holes.

“Whoop-Up by noon,” Barney predicted.

“Yes, by noon,” Tom Morse agreed.  “In time for a real sure-enough dinner with potatoes and beans and green stuff.”

“Y’ bet yore boots, an’ honest to gosh gravy,” added Brad Stearns, a thin and wrinkled little man whose leathery face and bright eyes defied the encroachment of time.  He was bald, except for a fringe of grayish hair above the temples and a few long locks carefully disposed over his shiny crown.  But nobody could have looked at him and called him old.

They were to be disappointed.

The teams struck the dusty road that terminated at the fort and were plodding along it to the crackling accompaniment of the long bull-whips.

“Soon now,” Morse shouted to Stearns.

The little man nodded.  “Mebbe they’ll have green corn on the cob.  Betcha the price of the dinner they do.”

“You’ve made a bet, dad.”

Stearns halted the leaders.  “What’s that?  Listen.”

The sound of shots drifted to them punctuated by faint, far yells.  The shots did not come in a fusillade.  They were intermittent, died down, popped out again, yielded to whoops in distant crescendo.

“Injuns,” said Stearns.  “On the peck, looks like.  Crees and Blackfeet, maybe, but you never can tell.  Better throw off the trail and dig in.”

West had ridden up.  He nodded.  “Till we know where we’re at.  Get busy, boys.”

They drew up the wagons in a semicircle, end to end, the oxen bunched inside, partially protected by a small cottonwood grove in the rear.

This done, West gave further orders.  “We gotta find out what’s doin’.  Chances are it’s nothin’ but a coupla bunches of braves with a cargo of redeye aboard, Tom, you an’ Brad scout out an’ take a look-see.  Don’t be too venturesome.  Soon’s you find out what the rumpus is, hot-foot it back and report, y’ understand.”  The big wolfer snapped out directions curtly.  There was no more competent wagon boss in the border-land than he.