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Fuselli walked back slowly to the tents where the Company was quartered, looking about him at the long lines of barracks, gaunt and dripping in the mist, at the big tin sheds of the cook shacks where the cooks and K. P.'s in greasy blue denims were slouching about amid a steam of cooking food. Something of the gesture with which the lieutenant drew on his gloves caught in the mind of Fuselli.

He turned back toward town and headed for the camp of these intruders. In fact, the surroundings of Forlorn River, except on the river side, reminded Belding of the mushroom growth of a newly discovered mining camp. Tents were everywhere; adobe shacks were in all stages of construction; rough clapboard houses were going up.

In front lay a broad shallow basin, streaked with filmy trails of mist, between which came the wan gleam of little pools. A causeway stretched out into the morass, sprinkled with the indistinct figures of toiling men. At its inner end, where it left the higher ground, a row of cars stood on a side-track, and near-by there were ranged straggling lines of tents and wooden shacks.

By and by, we picks up another lame duck and then another, feedin' 'em with chocolate and slingin' his jaw, and when we was at the limit, he halts us outside one of them stone shacks and knocks at the door. 'No soldiers here, snaps the red-headed angel, shuttin' the door right in his face.

The ominous silence was broken by rumbling wagons hurrying with their barrels of water, tractors chugging, turning long fresh rows of dirt as breaks, teams everywhere plowing around shacks and corrals. Night came on, inky black. The red light on the horizon and billowy clouds of smoke intensified the darkness. Over the range, cattle were bellowing in their mad fear of fire.

They had large rectangular windows, most of them open, a few with lattice shades. The doorways stood open without sign of a door; access to the ground was obtained by a narrow board incline. Interspersed with these stone houses I saw many single-room shacks, loosely built of narrow boards from the palm trees, and thatched with straw.

Miss Rosemary Allen stood still and watched it burn, and was a trifle surprised because she felt so little regret. Other shacks had caught fire and burned hotly, and she had wept with sympathy for the owners. But she did not weep when her own shack began to crackle and show yellow, licking tongues of flame.

Near the straggling settlement at the cove a group of shacks had sprung up to shelter the "Portygees" from the stranded-vessel.

The sky was ominous. Antelope went fleeting by; a little herd of horses, heads high, went snorting over the prairie. Coyotes and rabbits were running to shelter and a drove of cattle belonging to the Phillips ranch were on a stampede. One could hear them bawling madly. The guests had gone to the dinner together in a big wagon and were delivered to their respective shacks on the way back.

"Well," she said when he came near, "I suppose that means me. Does it?" She pointed to the sign, which read like this: WARNING!! NO TRESPASSING EAST OF HERE All Shacks, Live-Stock and Pilgrims Promptly AND Painfully Removed From These Premises "I'm over the line," she notified him, pulling her horse backward a few feet. "You're getting awfully particular, seems to me.