It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means, slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which he is afraid. In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor's guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which could be properly called such. Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the liberty, would lay hold of her at such times with rude power, making her feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped buttes and ramparts of riven stone. Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle that lay ahead. Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor. "You've got to keep your nerve," he advised, bluntly kind, "and not let the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton." "The lonesomeness?" she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase. "It's a disease," Smith proceeded, "and I suppose you git it anywhere; but you git it harder here. I've seen men take it, and turn gray and lose their minds, runnin' sheep. After you once git over it you're broke. You wouldn't leave this country for a purty on a chain." "I hope I'll not get it," she laughed. "How do people act when they take the lonesomeness?" "Well, some acts one way and some acts another," said Smith. "Some mopes and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about 'God's country' till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn't as much God's country as any place you can name! It's all His'n when you come down to the p'int, I reckon. But how a woman acts when she takes it I can't so much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a man." "Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?"