The old mail-sled running between Haney and Le Beau, in the days when
Dakota was still a Territory, was nearing the end of its hundred-mile
route.
It was a desolate country in those days: geographers still described it
as The Great American Desert, and in looks it certainly deserved the
title. Never was there anything as lonesome as that endless stretch of
snow reaching across the world until it cut into a cold gray sky,
excepting the same desert burned to a brown tinder by the hot wind of
Summer.
Nothing but sky and plain and its voice, the wind, unless you might
count a lonely sod shack blocked against the horizon, miles away from a
neighbor, miles from anywhere, its red-curtained square of window
glowing through the early twilight.
There were three men in the sled; Dan, the mail-carrier, crusty,
belligerently Western, the self-elected guardian of every one on his
route; Hillas, a younger man, hardly more than a boy, living on his
pre-emption claim near the upper reaches of the stage line; the third a
stranger from that part of the country vaguely defined as "the East." He
was traveling, had given his name as Smith, and was as inquisitive about
the country as he was reticent about his business there. Dan plainly
disapproved of him.
They had driven the last cold miles in silence when the stage-driver
turned to his neighbor. "Letter didn't say anything about coming out in
the Spring to look over the country, did it?"
Hillas shook his head. "It was like all the rest, Dan. Don't want to
build a railroad at all until the country's settled."
"God! Can't they see the other side of it? What it means to the folks
already here to wait for it?"
The stranger thrust a suddenly interested profile above the handsome
collar of his fur coat. He looked out over the waste of snow.
"You say there's no timber here?"
Dan maintained unfriendly silence and Hillas answered. "Nothing but
scrub on the banks of the creeks. Years of prairie fires have burned out
the trees, we think."
"Any ores--mines?"
The boy shook his head as he slid farther down in his worn buffalo coat
of the plains.
"We're too busy rustling for something to eat first. And you can't
develop mines without tools."
"Tools?"
"Yes, a railroad first of all."
Dan shifted the lines from one fur-mittened hand to the other, swinging
the freed numbed arm in rhythmic beating against his body as he looked
along the horizon a bit anxiously. The stranger shivered visibly.
"It's a god-forsaken country. Why don't you get out?"
Hillas, following Dan's glance around the blurred sky-line, answered
absently, "Usual answer is, 'Leave? It's all I can do to stay here.'"
Smith regarded him irritably. "Why should any sane man ever have chosen
this frozen wilderness?"