“Well, sir,” said Buford, slowly, “I used to plant corn and cotton, back in Kentucky, befo’ the war.”

“And you come from Kentucky out here?”

“Not precisely that; no, sir.  I moved to Missouri from Kentucky after the war, and came from Missouri here.”

Sam looked at him, puzzled.  “I allowed you’d never ranched it much,” he said, vaguely.  “How’d you happen to come out here?”

The quizzical smile again crossed Buford’s face.  “I think I shall have to give that up, on my honour,” he said.  “We just seem to have started on West, and to have kept going until we got here.  It seemed to be the fashion—­especially if you’d lost about everything in the world and seen everything go to pieces all about you.”  He added this with a slow and deliberate bitterness which removed the light trace of humour for the time.

“From Kentucky, eh?” said Sam, slowly and meditatively.  “Well, it don’t make no difference where you come from; we want good men in here, and you’ll find this a good country, I’ll gamble on that.  I’ve followed the front clean acrost the State, the last ten years, and I tell you it’s all right here.  You can make it if you take hold right.  Now I must be gittin’ along again over toward Plum Centre.  See you again if you stop in here on White Woman—­see you several times a week, like enough.  You must come up to Ellis soon as you git straightened out.  Ain’t many women-folks up there, but then they’re fine what there is.  Say,” and he drew Buford to one side as he whispered to him—­“say, they’s a mighty fine girl—­works in the depot hotel—­Nory’s her name—­you’ll see her if you ever come up to town.  I’m awful gone on that girl, and if you git any chanct, if you happen to be up there, you just put in a good word for me, won’t you?  I’d do as much for you.  I didn’t know, you know, but what maybe some of your women-folks’d sort of know how it was, you know.  They understand them things, I reckon.”

Buford listened with grave politeness, though with a twinkle in his eye, and promised to do what he could.  Encouraged at this, Sam stepped up and shook hands with Mrs. Buford and with the girl, not forgetting Aunt Lucy, an act which singularly impressed that late inhabitant of a different land, and made him her fast friend for life.

“Well, so long,” he said to them all in general as he turned away, “and good luck to you.  You ain’t makin’ no mistake in settlin’ here.  Good-bye till I see you all again.”

He stepped into the buckboard and clucked to his little team, the dust again rising from under the wheels.  The eyes of those remaining followed him already yearningly.  In a half hour there had been determined the location of a home, there had been suggested a means of livelihood, and there had been offered and received a friendship.  Here, in the middle of the great gray Plains, where no sign of any habitation was visible far as the eye could reach, these two white