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Many of the boys on the round-up are still asleep, the night herders returning to camp. The cook has started his preparations for breakfast. His wagon has a covered top like a prairie-schooner. The tail-board has been lowered to form a table, supported by rawhide straps. About him are scattered tin cups and kitchen utensils.
With a deep sigh of relief, we stowed our box in the "prairie-schooner," made a contract to have it packed on mule-back from Dog Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one among a gross of cheap watches which we had brought for trade with Indians and Trappers, and, relieving our horses by the first canter they had enjoyed that day, sped away with the deep conviction that the man who first called chrome and white-lead light colors must have been indulging the subtile irony of a diseased mind.
Viewed through the magnifying medium, a startling moving-picture swung into focus. Surrounding a big, covered wagon, of the prairie-schooner type, were from ten to a dozen wild-looking Mexicans, their straggling elf-locks crowned by high-peaked sombreros, and their serapes streaming out wildly about them, whipped into loose folds by the pace at which they rode.
But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three pretty creeks, near one of which they erected an adobe hut.
You've met Carolyn; she's a jolly girl to know, and she told me to bring you if possible." Evelyn dropped into a chair. "Oh, how I should love to go!" she said. "I never went on a sleigh-ride like that in my life. Do you go all together in a big load?" "Yes a regular prairie-schooner of a sleigh. Holds a dozen of us, packed like sardines, so nobody can get cold.
Now the mob stormed the entrance, and brushed the door-keepers to one side, and unbolted and swung back the big gates, and a swarm of yelling maniacs rushed the lumbering prairie-schooner up the slope into the building. The unlucky girl rolled off at this point, and somebody caught her, and mercifully carried her to one side.
His voice was the voice which had greeted her first from the steps of the prairie-schooner in which Lola's mother lay dead. "It's me!" conceded Mr. Keene, pleasantly. "In rather poor shape, as you see. It's always darkest before dawn! You're considerable changed, ma'am and to the better. I would hardly have known you. Is that girl in the big white hat Lola? Well, well!
Seventeen years ago miners working a claim of Belllounds's in the mountains above Middle Park had found a child asleep in the columbines along the trail. Near that point Indians, probably Arapahoes coming across the mountains to attack the Utes, had captured or killed the occupants of a prairie-schooner. There was no other clue.
Where'd he come from, Belllounds?" "Wal, if I don't disremember he was born in a prairie-schooner, comin' across the plains. His mother was a full-blood, an' come from Louisiana." "That accounts for an instinct I see croppin' out in Kane," rejoined Wade. "He likes to trail a man. I've caught him doin' it. An' he doesn't take to huntin' lions or bear.
The last trace I had was of the burnin' of a prairie-schooner by Arapahoes as they were goin' home from a foray on the Utes.... The little girl might have toddled off the trail. But I reckon she was hidden or dropped by her mother, or some one fleein' for life. Your men found her in the columbines." Belllounds drew a long, deep breath.
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