The old man loved the child and did his best by her, guiding her successfully through the elementary branches and succeeding in implanting in her mind what is known as a common-school education. She learned rapidly, but showed no particular interest in her studies. With the work of the grade she was enraptured. At ten she was driving a slip team, loading and dumping without the help of any one. Later she drove wheeler teams, then snap teams, and even the six-horse plow teams. She became a wonderful horsewoman, and, when in the West, entered contests at rodeos in trick riding, riding buckers and so-called outlaws, and won many prizes. Horses and mules loved her. Her voice or her hand spoke to them in a language that they seemed to know. She could break a colt to steady work in half the time required by any man she had ever met. It was said that the only thing a horse or mule would not do for her was to talk, whereupon Josepha trained a colt to "talk," just to prove that her understanding of animals was virtually unlimited. So Joshepha Modock grew to young womanhood, admired, loved, and spoiled by the thousands of nomad laborers who knew her. At eighteen she could truthfully boast of a hundred proposals of marriage, and some of them had been worth an ambitious girl's consideration. Gypo Jo they called her, and she was known all over the West, where her foster father's operations were confined, and stories of her beauty and horsewomanship had gone East and North and South, for railroad-construction laborers are a nomadic brood and repeat their tales and traditions from coast to coast. Then Pickhandle Modock, whose wife had died some years before, made the move which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin. Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor of consequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents and implements, he decided to change his activities to those of a freighter. Numerous railroad projects were being launched in the West, and most of the lines were bound to extend through countries difficult to access. Contractors preferred to have their freight hauled to them by regular freighters, so that every team of their own could be put on the task of railroad building. Or so Pickhandle Modock reasoned. Accordingly he sold his construction outfit, and with the proceeds bought heavy freight wagons and heavy young teams, and launched forth in his new career. For a year or more he followed railroad camps with his heavy freight outfit; then he suddenly decided that he was getting too old for camp life and to be eternally moving about. So when a new gold mine was opened up in the mountains that overlook southern California's desert, he moved into the little frontier town of Palada, forty miles from the new mines, and got the freighting contract from this railroad point up into the mountains.