We started up, but it was a long and toilsome climb.  In many places Jack and I had to get down on our hands and knees and feel out the path.  The worst place was a scramble up a bank twenty feet high, and covered with loose stones.  I was ahead.  The heroic little pony with her unwieldy load sniffed at the prospect a little, and then started bravely up, “hanging on by her toe-nails,” as Ollie said.  When she was almost to the top she stepped on a loose stone, lost her footing, went over, and rolled away into the darkness and underbrush.  Jack stumbled over a little of the hay which had come off in the path, hastily rolled up a torch, and lit it with a match.  By this light we found the pony on her back, like a tumble-bug, with her load for a cushion and her feet in the air, and kicking wildly in every direction.  While Ollie held the torch, Jack and I went to her rescue, and, after a vast deal of pulling and lifting, got her to her feet just as the hay torch died out.  Again she scrambled up the bank, and this time with success.  We went on, found the other horses, and were soon at the wagon.  We voted the pony all the hay she wanted, and went to bed tired.

The next day, the ninth out from Yankton, though it was a long run, brought us to Valentine, the first town on the railroad which we had seen since leaving the former place.  Before we reached it we went several miles along the upper ends of the canyons, down a long hill so steep that we had to chain both hind wheels, forded the Niobrara twice, followed the river several miles, went out across the military reservation, which was like a desert, saw six or eight hundred negro soldiers at Fort Niobrara, and finally drove through Valentine, and went into camp a mile west of town.  On the way we saw thousands of the biggest and reddest tumbleweeds, and two or three new sorts of cactus.  The colored troops surprised Ollie, as he had never seen any before.

“It’s the western winds and the hot sun that’s tanned those soldiers,” said Jack.  “We’ll look just that way, too, before we get back.”

Ollie was half inclined to believe this astonishing statement at first, but concluded that his uncle was joking.

[Illustration:  Sad Result of Dishonesty]

We went into camp on the banks of the Minichaduza River, a little brook which flows into the Niobrara from the northwest.  All night it gurgled and bubbled almost under our wheels.  A man stopped to chat with us as we sat around our camp-fire after supper.  We told him of our experience in getting the hay the night before.  He laughed and said:  “Ever steal any of your horse feed?”

“We haven’t yet,” answered Jack.  “We try to be reasonably honest.”