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At the next stop I run forward again and take another rod. I am now comparatively safe. The shacks think I am ditched. But the long day and the strenuous night are beginning to tell on me. Also, it is not so windy nor cold underneath, and I begin to doze. This will never do. Sleep on the rods spells death, so I crawl out at a station and go forward to the second blind.

The next day a slouchy old fellow, with two melancholy shacks of horses that might well tremble at the caw of a crow, was scratching the garden with a worn-out plow when she came down to breakfast. He had already made havoc in the flower borders, and Edith was disgusted with the outward aspect of himself and team to begin with.

Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks of its guardians.

In all directions up the hillside the tents and shacks had stretched, dance halls were gay, freighters plied along the winding road to the south. The man's mother had been one of the first women in the camp; and one of the last to go.

Cassidy dismounted and viewed the building with open disgust, walking around it to see what held it up, and when he finally realized that it was self-supporting his astonishment was profound. Undoubtedly there were shacks in the United States in worse condition, but he hoped their number was small. Of course he knew that the building was small.

It was a very humble and chastened man that went out from Shock's presence that evening. Through the days of the week that followed The Don went about his work speaking little, but giving himself with earnestness and in a new spirit, more gentle, more sympathetic, to his ministry to the sick in the camps and shacks round about. But still the gloom was unlifted from his heart.

The streets were unpaved, the sidewalks of rough boards in many places, in others no walks at all were attempted. Many of the buildings were mere shacks incongruously painted in brilliant colors, and there were more dogs than were ever before gathered into one place. Of that Bob was sure. "Do you suppose they've all made fortunes in oil?"

Five hundred yards up the wide bottom of the valley the construction camp sprawled its ugly mass. From where he stood in the doorway he looked down on it over the grade its straggling unformed planning; the flimsy shacks, half unhewn logs, half canvas, without respect for streets or angles or lines; its half-hearted struggle to lift itself up the slope to the sheltered forest above.

They seemed like the leaves of a forest, or the sands of the sea, if them sands and leaves wuz turned into men, wimmen, and children high hats, bunnets, umbrells, fans, canes, parasols, turbans, long robes, and short ones, gay ones, bright ones, feathers, sedan chairs, bijous, rollin' chairs, Shacks or that is how Josiah pronounced it. I told him that they wuz spelt S-h-e-i-k-s.

Still he had tunneled far enough to escape the frost when winter began, and the snow that stopped all surface work made transport easier. One could travel straight across divides and frozen lakes, and the sledges ran smoothly on the ice. When the trail south was broken he built shacks at the camping places and kept a gang of half-breeds felling trees and improving the road.