Susan heard it with regret. The comfort of dropping back into the feminine atmosphere, where obvious things did not need explanation, and all sorts of important communications were made by mental telepathy, was hard to relinquish. She would once again have to adjust herself to the dull male perceptions which saw and heard nothing that was not visible and audible. She would have to shut herself in with her own problems, getting no support or sympathy unless she asked for it, and then, before its sources could be tapped, she would have to explain why she wanted it and demonstrate that she was a deserving object. And it was hard to break the budding friendship with Lucy and Bella, for friendships were not long making on the Emigrant Trail. One day's companionship in the creaking prairie schooner had made the three women more intimate than a year of city visiting would have done. They made promises of meeting again in California. Neither party knew its exact point of destination--somewhere on that strip of prismatic color, not too crowded and not too wild but that wanderers of the same blood and birth might always find each other. In the evening the two girls sat in Susan's tent enjoying a last exchange of low-toned talk. The rain had stopped. The thick, bluish wool of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon was here and there rent apart, showing strips of lemon-colored sky. The ground was soaked, the footprints round the wagons filled with water, the ruts brimming with it. There was a glow of low fires round the camp, for the mosquitoes were bad and the brown smudge of smoldering buffalo chips kept them away. Susan gave the guest the seat of honor--her saddle spread with a blanket--and herself sat on a pile of skins. The tent had been pitched on a rise of ground and already the water was draining off. Through the looped entrance they could see the regular lights of the fires, spotted on the twilight like the lamps of huge, sedentary glow worms, and the figures of men recumbent near where the slow smoke spirals wound languidly up. Above the sweet, moist odor of the rain, the tang of the burning dung rose, pungent and biting. Here as the evening deepened they comfortably gossiped, their voices dropping lower as the camp sunk to rest. They exchanged vows of the friendship that was to be renewed in California, and then, drawing closer together, watching the fires die down to sulky red sparks and the sentinel's figure coming and going on its lonely beat, came to an exchange of opinions on love and marriage.