She had heard all the arguments before. They had little or no terrors for her now. They were the arguments used by the people back in her eastern home, those dear, dear people, her people—how far away she was!—when they had schemed and plotted so pathetically to keep her with them, the second one to break away from the slow, safe, and calm traditions of her kin in the place where generation after generation of her people had lived and died, and now lay waiting the Great Judgment in the peaceful country burying-ground. She had listened to them dutifully, half-believingly, swallowed hard and followed her uncle, her father’s youngest brother, to the “Land of the Dakotahs,” the fair land of promise, right in the face of her fears and the loneliness that loomed before her—a thing with smirks and horns and devil’s eyes that would not be suppressed, but perched itself insolently before her, a heart-choking presence, magnified by the mist in her eyes, through all the long, long journey to the west country. It had left her for a while when she had crossed the Sioux and was on Dakota soil at last. It was such a glorious land through which she was passing, the fair region of the corn-belt, and such a prosperous land, and the fields spread so broadly. It had been a sunny day with clear skies, one of those days when distances are so infinite in South Dakota, the land of widespread spaces. It was indeed a fertile valley through which she was passing. There is none better on earth. When her train had pulled out of Yankton, she reflected with a whimsical smile that she had not yet seen an Indian. To be sure, she had not really expected to see one in feathers and war-paint, but surely an Indian of some description—did not the traditions of her youth run that Dakota was the land of Indians and blizzards? She well remembered—indeed, could she ever forget?—when, a tot of seven or eight, she had run out into the road to gaze after the carry-all that was taking her well-beloved young uncle away, away, into that dreadful land where blood ran like rivers and where people trimmed their clothes with scalps. She even remembered the feel of the warm, yellow dust up to her bare ankles and the dreadful lump that she couldn’t swallow when her uncle leaned out and waved his hat vigorously, crying out gayly:— “Good-bye, little girl, good-bye. If they take my scalp, I’ll beg them as a special favor to send it back to you as a keepsake. Don’t forget to take good care of it. I was always rather proud of my yaller mop.”