Two days after they had definitely left the last of the wooded country behind them, Dick camped in the shelter of a poplar bluff, while Peter Many-Names went off a day's journey to the east with the intention of procuring a couple of ponies. "Saw fire-smoke dark when sun rose," he declared, "and when fires, there wigwams; where wigwams, there Indians; where Indians, there ponies. You keep close, and I come back soon." "But you can't buy ponies, for we 've nothing to give in exchange for them," Dick protested. However, Peter took no notice of him, and presently departed, leaving Dick to loneliness, and wonder unsatisfied. He had leisure to wonder as much as he liked. Peter departed stealthily, leaving him in charge of all their little stores, with only the slim poplars and his blanket to shield him from the winds that had now begun to blow very coldly. He had, as has already been written, leisure to spare, for it was four days before Peter appeared from the southwest, riding one pony and leading another. They were sturdy little brown beasts, very shy of Dick, and practically wild. There was nothing remarkable about them in any way except that they were very muddy. It was not for some time that Dick discovered that this dried mud concealed some very conspicuous white spots. Thereupon he wondered more and more, noticing that there was nothing lacking in the equipment or among the possessions of the triumphant but always taciturn Peter. "How did you get them?" he asked. "Did you find friends, or what? However did you manage to get them?" But Peter only grinned, as he occasionally condescended to do when much amused, and Dick got no further answer. There the ponies were, and there Peter evidently intended they should stay. To Dick, the beginning of their wanderings across the prairie was as the beginning of a new world. The sense of vast space was almost terrifying. Vision was obstructed by nothing, and the great skies rounded down to the utmost edge of the great undulating plain. They were now travelling quite slowly, but after a few days--nay, a few hours--the prairies seemed to close in upon them, to swallow them up in vastness and silence. Dick, dreamy and impressionable, felt a little lonely and bewildered, troubled by the mighty width and apparently limitless expanse surrounding him. But to Peter Many-Names the prairies were as home-like and familiar as a meadow. Here, where Dick would see the far skyline broken by the irregular black mass of a herd of bison, the wheat waves now, mile after mile, about the countless farms and homesteads. These fertile lands, known then to few but the Indian and the hunter, have been claimed by civilisation, and their produce goes to the feeding of the nations. Agriculture has taken the prairies, and their nomad life is surely slipping into the past.