"Where's that man o' yourn?"

"I d'n know; I 'lowed he was hyur; I can't think whur he's took hisself."

"Ain't he about?" demanded Mr. Crimp, from the middle of the pool, and several voices replied, "No, he ain't."

Jimmy Rooney thrust himself into the midst of the excited crowd. He was a blueeyed boy of three years; his hat, in close imitation of Mr. Crimp's, was stuck on the side of his head; and his sturdy little figure bristled with importance.

"I seen him! I seen Joel Milligan!" An interested audience collected. "Where'd he go to? Where's he at?' Jimmy jerked his thumb in the direction of the Milligan claim.

"Over yonder! I seen him kitin' acros't the prairie! He jist hit the road!"

The spell was broken; the people parted into knots of twos and threes; everybody talked aloud at once. In the midst of the confusion, Malvina Milligan lifted her children into the aged family buggy, and jumped in after them. Several voices called to detain her. She shouted back her inten

1

tion of finding and restoring her truant husband, slapped the old mule with the reins, and ambled away; she was soon beyond recall.

Thus it befell that the only remaining candidate for baptism was Maggie Milligan; but, upon being importuned to come forth and enter the water, she, too, hung back, and refused to be baptized without her sister. Not even when Mr. Crimp himself clambered up the bank, and desired her to remember her vows, and attempt to lead her down into the water, did she reverse her decision, but stood stubbornly silent, with burning cheeks and tears dropping from her eyes.

Mr. Crimp sat down on the bank. He looked considerably less elated than half an hour since. He seemed quite out of humor from the way he slapped the water out of his boots and thrashed his wet trousers. But the fear of losing his popularity soon made him think better of his pettishness; and he once more mingled familiarly with his congregation, contenting himself with indulging in little pleasantries at the expense of his faint-hearted converts.

""Tain't very pleasant to get your breeches wet for one convert! But a minister has got to expect such things," said Mr. Crimp.

Neither Joel Milligan nor his wife Malvina reappeared on the scene, and the people, grown tired of waiting, dispersed, leaving the valley and the lonely ravine and the quiet pool that continually emptied its waters into the sluggish little stream. And all the little animals came out of their holes and ran about in the golden sunshine. And the myriad inhabitants of the prairie went on with their simple existence, untroubled by the illusions and the emotions and the exaltations of their human neighbors who came to visit the pool.

IV

SPENDING THE DAY

Confusion reigned among the elements in the days that followed the immersion at Bittern's sheep-pond. Rising in the middle of the morning, with a frolic among the tumble-weeds and now and then a puff of sand in the eyes; gathering in fury as the day advanced, obscuring with a smoke-gray haze mountains and sky, and thickening the air with a fine brown dust; falling at dark to leave a ghostly stillness in its wake; in violent gusts in the night-time often renewing its spent forces: so, every day and all day long, blew the wind on Windy Creek. Monotony wrapped the plains: always the same blurring of roads and fences, horizon and mountains, always the dim figures of patient cattle standing motionless, their backs to the wind.

One who has for many days at a time witnessed such a sullying of the landscape, felt the rocking of the frail structure that shelters him, listened to the wild shrieking of the wind around the corner, its demoniac wailing down the stove-pipe, and its dismal moaning within the building paper, can imagine nothing drearier:—it is then that the mind reverts to the old geography at school, and dwells upon the lesson of that waste-land known as the Great American Desert.

A morning of quiet came at last, and Ruth and Hermia Wood crossed the fields to Rose Rooney's to spend the day. The naked spots between the grass tufts were swept clean of every grain of sand as though by a ruthless broom. Brushed by their skirts, the dried flower-heads and weeds and blades of grass shook off little showers of dust. But the air was fresh and cool, and a great silence had fallen over the plains.

Pete Rooney's house, a three-roomed cottage painted lead-color and garnished with a front piazza and a brick chimney, was