He also sought at the restaurants, and offered to leave the gun as security for his breakfast. One of the old night women of Cheyenne, straggling along in the grey dawn of morning, saw him, and bought him his breakfast. Her motherly intuition had sensed his needs, and her ragged heart had pulsed for the moment with the eternal sensibility of charity. Thus even in the lowly and the sinful, the spark of eternity ever shines.

A Black Hills freighter hired the tenderfoot, being in need of a man to drive a trail wagon. So, that freighting, and untangling a string of obstinate miles, was his initiation into the west ; from which interesting and engaging pastime, he graduated into his original purpose of "working upon a ranch."

That was more than two score years ago, and the prairies north of Cheyenne, was where he kept lonely vigils, caring for, and moving the cattle from place to place. It was monoton-

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

ous labor, and he longed for the woods, and the woodland companions on the banks of the Ohio. The bees and the butterflies were calling him.

The lone environment, the solitude of the prairies, are enough to try the intellects of mature people, and there is graver danger for the young. Out of the high tablelands, the mirage makes everything seem so unreal. Lakes where lakes are not, trees where the trees have never grown, inverted cities on the sky, mountains lifting themselves suddenly from the plain, to sink back again at one's approach.