Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/173

 hanging outside at the back of the wagon she cut enough for her own supper, and fed the young collie she was training. Then, she dipped a bucket of water from the barrel, made a fire in the tiny camp stove and put on the tea kettle. She looked with distaste at a pile of soiled dishes that remained from Bowers's breakfast, and at the unmade bunk with a grimy flour sack for a pillow case.

"Thank goodness. Bowers will be back to-morrow!"

She swept the untidy floor with a stump of a broom and replaced it in its leather straps outside the wagon. When the water was heated, she washed the dishes and scoured the greasy frying pan with a bit of sagebrush, for there was no makeshift of the west with which she was not familiar. Then she made biscuits, fried bacon and a potato, and boiled coffee, eating, when the meal was ready, with the gusto of hunger.

Her hair glistened with flakes as she withdrew her head after opening the upper half of the door to throw out the dish water later.

"It's coming straight down as though it meant business," she muttered. "I'm liable to have to break trail to get them out to feed to-morrow." Then, with a look of anxiety as the thought came to her, "If they ever 'piled up' in a draw they're so fat half of them would smother."

While the fire went out she sat thinking what such a loss would mean to her—ruin, literally; and worse, for in addition she had an indebtedness to consider.

"It seems colder." She shivered, and straightening the soiled soogans, she spread her canvas coat over the grimy pillow, pulled off her riding boots and lay down with her clothes on. Before she fell asleep Kate remembered the eccentric travelers, and again wondered what possible business could bring them, but mostly she