I was tired, so soon I went to bed.  I could hear him as he cut cedar boughs for his own fireside bed, and as he rattled around among his pots and pans.  Did you ever eat pork and beans heated in a frying-pan on a camp-fire for breakfast?  Then if you have not, there is one delight left you.  But you must be away out in Wyoming, with the morning sun just gilding the distant peaks, and your pork and beans must be out of a can, heated in a disreputable old frying-pan, served with coffee boiled in a battered old pail and drunk from a tomato-can.  You’ll never want iced melons, powdered sugar, and fruit, or sixty-nine varieties of breakfast food, if once you sit Trilby-wise on Wyoming sand and eat the kind of breakfast we had that day.

After breakfast Hiram K. Hull hitched our horses to the wagon, got his own horses ready, and then said, “’T ain’t more ’n half a mile straight out between them two hills to the stage-road, but I guess I had better go and show you exactly, or you will be millin’ around here all day, tryin’ to find it.”  In a very few minutes we were on the road, and our odd host turned to go.  “S’long!” he called.  “Tell Stewart you seen old Hikum.  Him and me’s shared tarps many’s the nights.  We used to be punchers together,—­old Clyde and me.  Tell him old Hikum ain’t forgot him.”  So saying, he rode away into the golden morning, and we drove onward, too.

We stopped for lunch only a few minutes that day, and we reached the Bridger community about two that afternoon.  The much sought Aurelia had accepted the position of lifetime housekeeper for a sheep-herder who had no house to keep, so I had to cast about for whatever comfort I could.  The roadhouse is presided over by a very able body of the clan of Ferguson.  I had never met her, but formalities count for very little in the West.  She was in her kitchen, having more trouble, she said, than a hen whose ducklings were in swimming.  I asked her if she could accommodate the children and myself.  “Yes,” she said, “I can give you a bed and grub, but I ain’t got no time to ask you nothing.  I ain’t got no time to inquire who you are nor where you come from.  There’s one room left.  You can have that, but you’ll have to look out for yourself and young ’uns.”  I felt equal to that; so I went out to have the horses cared for and to unload the kiddies.

Leaning against the wagon was a man who made annual rounds of all the homes in our community each summer; his sole object was to see what kind of flowers we succeeded with.  Every woman in our neighborhood knows Bishey Bennet, but I don’t think many would have recognized him that afternoon.  I had never seen him dressed in anything but blue denim overalls and overshirt to match, but to-day he proudly displayed what he said was his dove-colored suit.  The style must have been one of years ago, for I cannot remember seeing trousers quite so skimpy.  He wore top-boots, but as a concession to fashion he wore the boot-tops