The mire-holes were getting deeper and deeper; for the weather was showery.  I helped many teams out of their troubles, and was helped by some; though my load was not overly heavy, and I had four true-pulling heavy cows that, when mated with the Alderney bull I had left behind me with Mr. Westervelt, gave me the best stock of cattle—­they and my other cows—­in Monterey County, until Judge Horace Stone began bringing in his pure-bred Shorthorns; and even then, by grading up with Shorthorn blood I was thought by many to have as good cattle as he had.  So I got out of most of my troubles on the Old Ridge Road with my cows, as I did later with them and their descendants when the wheat crop failed us in the ’seventies; but I had a hard time that day.  It grew better in the afternoon; and as night drew on I could see the road for miles ahead of me a solitary stretch of highway, without a team; but far off, coming over a hill toward me, I saw a figure that looked strange and mysterious to me, somehow.

5

It seemed to be a woman or girl, for I could see even at that distance her skirts blown out by the brisk prairie wind.  She came over the hill as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for something afar off.  At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had come.  Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for some time.  Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to side of the road as if staggering—­and finally she went out of my sight, dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see.  It was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night, and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.

I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and tender, quivering, pointed leaves:  in one of these clumps I hid my wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire.  It seemed already a little odd to find myself where I could not look out afar over the prairie.

The little creek ran bank-full, but clear, and not muddy as our streams now always are after a rain.  One of the losses of Iowa through civilization has been the disappearance of our lovely little brooks.  Then every few miles there ran a rivulet as clear as crystal, its bottom checkered at the riffles into a brilliant pattern like plaid delaine by the shining of the clean red, white and yellow granite pebbles