“Kla’uns,” said Susy, with a hysterical little laugh.

“Well?”

“The wagon’s gone.”

Clarence started.  It was true.  Not only their wagon, but the whole train of oxen and teamsters had utterly disappeared, vanishing as completely as if they had been caught up in a whirlwind or engulfed in the earth!  Even the low cloud of dust that usually marked their distant course by day was nowhere to be seen.  The long level plain stretched before them to the setting sun, without a sign or trace of moving life or animation.  That great blue crystal bowl, filled with dust and fire by day, with stars and darkness by night, which had always seemed to drop its rim round them everywhere and shut them in, seemed to them now to have been lifted to let the train pass out, and then closed down upon them forever.

CHAPTER II

Their first sensation was one of purely animal freedom.

They looked at each other with sparkling eyes and long silent breaths.  But this spontaneous outburst of savage nature soon passed.  Susy’s little hand presently reached forward and clutched Clarence’s jacket.  The boy understood it, and said quickly,—­

“They ain’t gone far, and they’ll stop as soon as they find us gone.”

They trotted on a little faster; the sun they had followed every day and the fresh wagon tracks being their unfailing guides; the keen, cool air of the plains, taking the place of that all-pervading dust and smell of the perspiring oxen, invigorating them with its breath.

“We ain’t skeered a bit, are we?” said Susy.

“What’s there to be afraid of?” said Clarence scornfully.  He said this none the less strongly because he suddenly remembered that they had been often left alone in the wagon for hours without being looked after, and that their absence might not be noticed until the train stopped to encamp at dusk, two hours later.  They were not running very fast, yet either they were more tired than they knew, or the air was thinner, for they both seemed to breathe quickly.  Suddenly Clarence stopped.

“There they are now.”

He was pointing to a light cloud of dust in the far-off horizon, from which the black hulk of a wagon emerged for a moment and was lost.  But even as they gazed the cloud seemed to sink like a fairy mirage to the earth again, the whole train disappeared, and only the empty stretching track returned.  They did not know that this seemingly flat and level plain was really undulatory, and that the vanished train had simply dipped below their view on some further slope even as it had once before.  But they knew they were disappointed, and that disappointment revealed to them the fact that they had concealed it from each other.  The girl was the first to succumb, and burst into a quick spasm of angry tears.  That single act of weakness called out the boy’s pride and strength.  There was no longer an equality of suffering; he had become her protector; he felt himself responsible for both.  Considering her no longer his equal, he was no longer frank with her.