“Thank you so much, but I won’t detain you any longer. Your information makes Lost Trail even more interesting than I had expected.” Besides, Miss Carmichael had a faint suspicion that this might be a preconcerted plan to terrify the “lady tenderfoot,” and she prided herself on being equal to the situation. The time at her disposal before the stage would embark on that unknown sea of prairies she spent in the delectable pastime of shopping. The financial and social interests of the town seemed to converge in Hugous & Co.’s “trading store,” where Miss Carmichael invested in an extra package of needles for the mere excitement of being one of the shoppers, though her aunt Adelaide had stocked the little plaid-silk work-bag to repletion with every variety of needle known to woman. She pricked up her ears, meanwhile, at some of the purchases made by the cow-boys for their camp-larders—devilled ham, sardines, canned tomatoes heading the list as prime favorites. Did these strapping border lads live by the fruit of the tin alone? Apparently yes, with the sophisticated accompaniment of soda biscuit, to judge by the quantity of baking-powder they invested in—literally pounds of it. Men in any other condition of life would have died of slow poisoning as the result of it. There were other customers at Hugous’ that morning besides the spurred and booted cow-puncher and his despised compeer, the sheep-herder. That restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community of its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid, lavish promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South and their gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying towards the land of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the shrieking “fire-wagon.” All day they would toil over the infinitude of prairie, the sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive vanishing-point, the horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of the wagon life were not without charm. They began to wander in quest of they knew not precisely what, and from these vague beginnings there had sprung into existence that nomadic population that was once such a feature of the far West, but is now going the way of the Indians and the cow-boys. This breathing-space in the long journey had for them the stimulus of a holiday-making. They bought their sides of bacon and their pounds of coffee as merrily as if they were playing a game of forfeits, the women fingering the calico they did not want for the joy of pricing and making shoppers’ talk.