baking-powder they invested in—literally pounds of it. Men in any other
condition of life would have died of slow poisoning as the result of it.

There were other customers at Hugous’ that morning besides the spurred and
booted cow-puncher and his despised compeer, the sheep-herder. That
restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community of
its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid, lavish
promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South and their
gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying towards the land
of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the shrieking
"fire-wagon." All day they would toil over the infinitude of prairie, the
sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive vanishing-point, the
horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of the wagon life were not
without charm. They began to wander in quest of they knew not precisely
what, and from these vague beginnings there had sprung into existence that
nomadic population that was once such a feature of the far West, but is
now going the way of the Indians and the cow-boys.

This breathing-space in the long journey had for them the stimulus of a
holiday-making. They bought their sides of bacon and their pounds of
coffee as merrily as if they were playing a game of forfeits, the women
fingering the calico they did not want for the joy of pricing and making
shoppers’ talk.

The scene had a scriptural flavor that not even the blue overalls of the
men nor the calico gowns of the women could altogether eliminate. Their
wagons, bulging with household goods and trailing with kitchen utensils
secured by bits of rope, were drawn up in front of the trading-store. From
a pump, at some little distance, the pilgrims filled their stone
water-bottles, for the wise traveller does not trust to the chance springs