Jed and his cow guards were obliged to drive the cattle back into the ridges for better grazing, for the valley and adjacent country, which had not been burned over by the Indians the preceding fall, held a lower matting of heavy dry grass through which the green grass of springtime appeared only in sparser and more smothered growth.  As many of the cattle and horses even now showed evil results from injudicious driving on the trail, it was at length decided to make a full day’s stop so that they might feed up.

Molly Wingate, now assured that the Pawnees no longer were in the vicinity, ventured out for pasturage with her team of mules, which she had kept tethered close to her own wagon.  She now rapidly was becoming a good frontierswoman and thoughtful of her locomotive power.  Taking the direction of the cattle herd, she drove from camp a mile or two, resolving to hobble and watch her mules while they grazed close to the cattle guards.

She was alone.  Around her, untouched by any civilization, lay a wild, free world.  The ceaseless wind of the prairie swept old and new grass into a continuous undulating surface, silver crested, a wave always passing, never past.  The sky was unspeakably fresh and blue, with its light clouds, darker edged toward the far horizon of the unbounded, unbroken expanse of alternating levels and low hills.  Across the broken ridges passed the teeming bird life of the land.  The Eskimo plover in vast bands circled and sought their nesting places.  Came also the sweep of cinnamon wings as the giant sickle-billed curlews wheeled in vast aerial phalanx, with their eager cries, “Curlee!  Curlee!  Curlee!”—­the wildest cry of the old prairies.  Again, from some unknown, undiscoverable place, came the liquid, baffling, mysterious note of the nesting upland plover, sweet and clean as pure white honey.

Now and again a band of antelope swept ghostlike across a ridge.  A great gray wolf stood contemptuously near on a hillock, gazing speculatively at the strange new creature, the white woman, new come in his lands.  It was the wilderness, rude, bold, yet sweet.

Who shall say what thoughts the flowered wilderness of spring carried to the soul of a young woman beautiful and ripe for love, her heart as sweet and melting as that of the hidden plover telling her mate of happiness?  Surely a strange spell, born of youth and all this free world of things beginning, fell on the soul of Molly Wingate.  She sat and dreamed, her hands idle, her arms empty, her beating pulses full, her heart full of a maid’s imaginings.

How long she sat alone, miles apart, an unnoticed figure, she herself could not have said—­surely the sun was past zenith—­when, moved by some vague feeling of her own, she noticed the uneasiness of her feeding charges.

The mules, hobbled and side-lined as Jed had shown her, turned face to the wind, down the valley, standing for a time studious and uncertain rather than alarmed.  Then, their great ears pointed, they became uneasy; stirred, stamped, came back again to their position, gazing steadily in the one direction.