She wore a dark red flannel shirtwaist, a divided skirt of black wool, a suede jacket and black cap like a jockey's. There was an easy strength and self-assurance in her carriage. She crossed the firebreak and rode up over the ridge calling her cheery "Hoo-hoo-hoo!"
"She's going to stay all night," exclaimed Ida Mary, seeing the small bag dangling from the saddlehorn.
After supper we counted the dimes we had earned from the postcards--more than $50. And far into the night we talked of the people who had invaded the Strip.
Next spring there would be life again over the plains when the "lucky numbers" came out to live on the Strip. Would the reporter from Chicago be among them, and the mystery girl with the baby in her arms, and Pa Wagor--and a young cartoonist from Milwaukee?
It was something to look forward to when the blizzards shut us off from the world.
The settlers of the McClure district went on with their work as though there had never been a land opening. The men fed their stock and hauled fuel for winter, while the women tacked comforters and sewed and patched heavy clothing.
Ida Mary went on with her school work and I continued to wrestle with the newspaper. We put a little shed back of the shack where we could set buckets of coal and keep the water can handy. With the postcard money we bought a drum for the stovepipe, to serve as an oven. One either baked his own bread or did without it.
Huey Dunn did some late fall plowing. "What are you plowing your land for now, with winter coming?" neighbors asked.
"For oats next spring," Huey replied; "if the damn threshing machine gets around to thresh out the oatstack in time to sow 'em."
The homesteaders shook their heads. There was no figuring out when Huey Dunn would do things. This time he was far ahead of them. They did not know that fall plowing, to mellow and absorb the moisture from winter snow and spring rain, was the way to conquer the virgin soil. They had to find it out through hard experience. Fallowing, Huey called it.
Lasso said, "The range is no place for clingin' vines, 'cause there hain't nothin' to cling to." Ida Mary, under that quiet manner of hers, had always been self-reliant, and I was learning not to cling.