She entered at once upon her studies, under the care of private tutors, and in two years' time the rapid advancement made placed her far along toward the goal of learning. Academic courses followed in quick succession, her wonderful intellectual powers seemingly never to weary or flag in their grinding evolution from savagery to civilized enlightenment during her self-imposed task of ten years in the bright fields of knowledge. CHAPTER XI. COLLEGE VACATIONS. During one of the spring terms, when the birds taunted Chiquita with their freedom, Jack and Hazel proposed, during the recess of two weeks, that they all take a trip to the Indian Territory and visit the Cherokees, Kiowas and Comanches, among whose tribes were many relatives of Chiquita. Over a rough and dusty roadbed rolled a long train of coaches bearing tourists, farmseekers and business men through banks of smoke and clouds of cinders to the great farming lands of the west. At Coffeyville Jack disembarked his party and in a comfortable "buckboard" continued the journey. A couple of miles of dusty road between sweltering hedges of osage orange led them to the boundary of the Indian Territory. Along this in a never varying line for a hundred miles on the north side stretched farm after farm, divided from the highway and each other by thousands of miles of wire fencing. Bare cornfields and treeless wastes spread forth uninviting landscape, marked at intervals with the houses of the ambitious ranchmen, who, by preoccupation or purchase, obtained title to the soil. Alkali dust smarted the nostrils, and the glare of the noonday sun scorched the faces of travelers. Plowmen, making ready for the season's planting, rested their teams as the pleasure seekers stopped to inquire the road to California Creek. To the south of the highway rolled a grass-covered prairie that seemed a great poly-chromed rug of velvet. The hand of man had not chiseled the virgin soil with plowshare, nor riveted its surface with post and rail. A well defined road led zigzag over its undulating bosom until the hideous regularity of section lines disappeared behind a friendly stretch of upland. Cottonwood, elm and oak became frequent as they entered the valley of the Verdigris and great stretches of forest-dotted park enchanted the eye and gave rest to tiresome monotony of treeless plain. Occasionally an unpretentious, unpainted shanty gave evidence of man, and inquiry proved it to be the abiding place of one of the precivilized occupants of unfettered expanse of the American continent, the other a "squaw man," who had made matrimonial alliance with the partially civilized companion.