“Now we can break through,” Carver stated, and they urged their horses into a lope and passed the wagons that lagged behind, darting past others as opportunity offered. The girl saw humanity in the raw, the bars of convention lowered by excitement and each man’s true nature standing forth undisguised. She was treated to kaleidoscopic flashes of human avarice and sublime generosity. A heavy wagon came to grief as its owner lashed his horses over the four-foot bank of a dry wash. The tongue was stabbed into the earth, buckled and snapped, piling the outfit up in a tangled heap in the bottom of the dry gulch. A man in a light rig cheered the accident as he made a safe crossing of the wash at a point some few feet away where the banks were less precipitate, shrieking a derisive farewell to the unfortunates as he passed. A chap-clad rider set his horse back on its haunches and dismounted. “Crawl him, stranger,” he invited. “Give that pony his head and he’ll take you where you’re aiming for. I’ll help the woman straighten out this tangle.” The man boarded the horse and darted off, leaving the cowboy to care for his wife and children and the struggling team. Just beyond the wreck a man had leaped from a wagon to plant his flag while his wife held the horses. A single man had unloaded from a runabout with similar intent and as the girl passed them the two were fighting savagely, endeavoring through the medium of physical combat to settle the question as to which one had first placed foot upon the ground. While the wife and family of the one gazed upon the scene from the wagon, the horse of the other was running away with the runabout which was lurching perilously across the dips and sways of the prairie. They passed old Judd Armstrong, his bony horses surging on at an awkward gallop. The little old lady gripped a staff topped by a white scrap of cloth with which she intended to flag the first scrap of ground they crossed where she could see no others out ahead. But always there was a swarm of scurrying shapes far out in the lead. Just as Carver pulled out ahead of the last fringe of wheeled conveyances the girl heard again the shrill exultant cowboy yelp and saw the man riding just ahead of them. He was a big fellow with a week-old growth of beard, mounted on a rangy bay horse that wore a Texas brand. He had given the animal its head and was half-turned in the saddle, looking back at the sea of lurching, swaying vehicles. His mouth was extended in a grin and he waved his gun aloft. “Charge!” he bellowed. “Charge!”