was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the
spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the
long, sultry afternoons.

Otherwise not an excrescence marred the face of nature. The single horse
Rowland owned, useless now while his crop matured, was breaking sod far
to the west on the bank of the Jim River. Not a live thing other than
human moved about the place. With them into this land of silence had
come a mongrel collie. For a solitary month he had stood guard; then one
night, somewhere in the distance, in the east where flowed the Big
Sioux, had sounded the long-drawn-out cry of a timber wolf, alternately
nearer and more remote, again and again. With the coming of morning the
collie was gone. Whether dead or answering the call of the wild they
never knew, nor ever filled his place.

Lonely, isolated as the place itself, was Sam Rowland that afternoon of
late August. Silent as a mute was he as to what he had seen; elaborately
careful likewise to carry out the family programme as usual.

"Sleepy, kid?" he queried when dinner was over.

Baby Bess, taciturn, sun-browned autocrat, nodded silent corroboration.

"Come, then," and, willing horse, the big man got clumsily to all fours
and, prancing ponderously, drew up at her side.

"Hang tight," he admonished and, his wife smiling from the doorway as
only a mother can smile, ambled away through the sun and the dust;
climbed slowly, the tiny brown arms clasped tightly about his neck, down
the ladder to the retreat, adjusted the pillow and the patchwork quilt