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Almost every tribe has its own way of constructing its lodges, encamping, making fires, its own style of dress, by some of which peculiarities the experienced frontiersman can generally distinguish them. The Osages, for example, make their lodges in the shape of a wagon-top, of bent rods or willows covered with skins, blankets, or the bark of trees.
The broken crockery, and leaky black tea-pot, and ancient cooking-stove the pipe of the latter running up through the wagon-top are once more aboard, wife and children packed in, and the uneasy frontiersman is pushing out again towards solitude. Tom had been reviewing this bit of family history more in detail, and much more vividly than we have now done.
Jayne's Emporium," she called, supplying the rest of the familiar advertisement from memory. "What on earth are you doing with that wagon-top ovah you?" she asked from the front door, where she stood watching his approach. He was striding along whistling as cheerily as if it were a midsummer day.
"A balloon your granny!" exclaimed Walter, tying the legs of the antelope to his saddle pommel. "Go ahead, girls. I'll be right after you." "It was a wagon-top," explained Rhoda, twitching her already nervous pony around. "They did not get it tied down soon enough." "Then a big wind is coming!" Nan agreed. "Come on!" shouted Rhoda, setting spurs to her mount.
Stuffing the interstices with dried grass, and banking up the earth around it, she threw over it the wagon-top, which she fastened firmly to stakes driven in the ground, and thus provided a shelter tolerably rain-tight and weather-proof. Thither she conveyed the stoves and other contents of the wagon.
For I didn't doubt, from what Minnie said, I had really once loved Dr. Ivor. Horrible and ghastly as it might be to realise it, I didn't doubt it was the truth. I had once loved the very man I was now bent on pursuing as a criminal and a murderer! "You're sure that's him, Minnie?" I cried, trying to conceal my agitation. "You're sure that's Courtenay Ivor, the man stooping on the wagon-top?"
I was a child, a boy of eight or nine, and I was weary, as was the woman, dusty-visaged and haggard, who sat up beside me and soothed a crying babe in her arms. She was my mother; that I knew as a matter of course, just as I knew, when I glanced along the canvas tunnel of the wagon-top, that the shoulders of the man on the driver's seat were the shoulders of my father.
But they were not destined to arrive at the Peckham ranch without an incident of more importance than these. It was past mid-afternoon. They had had their cold bite, rested the mules and Molly, and the latter was plodding along in the shade of the wagon-top all but asleep, and her rider was in a like somnolent condition.
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