"Pooh!" Cindy made a face at her brother. "How do you know I did?" "Maybe that was someone else snoring?" "I _don't_ snore!" "Better get some breakfast into you," Pete said. Everyone else had finished breakfast. While Cindy ate, Pete and Jed staked the work horses and mules in fresh grass and saddled Sunshine and the roan ponies. Alec started washing the dishes, and as soon as she was finished, Cindy handed him her plate. "Hey!" he protested. "You might at least wash your own!" "I have to pack a lunch." "Not today," said her father, who had come back and overheard. "Everyone's been working hard, and everyone deserves a rest. We'll eat in a restaurant." [Illustration] When everything was ready, Pete mounted his roan pony and Jed swung up on Sunshine. After an argument, which Cindy won, about who was going to sit the saddle and hold the reins, Alec and Cindy rode double on Sparkle. The mules and horses had also worked hard, and they needed a rest. They rode at a walk across the grasslands. Everywhere, in what only a short time ago had been such a lonely place, were sod houses and gardens. Not all the homesteads had men on them, but nearly all had grazing horses, mules, or oxen, and there were a few cattle. Then they mounted a hillock, looked down on Plains City, and halted in astonishment. "Ooh!" squealed Cindy. Alec said, "Gosh!" "Beats all!" Jed Simpson exclaimed. "Sure does!" Pete seconded. Instead of a town or village, they looked down upon a city. True, for the most part it was a city of tents. But there were some wooden buildings, well-planned streets, streams of wagons going in and coming out, and more people than any of them had ever before seen in one place. The sounds were those of hammering, sawing, shouting, creaking, everything that could possibly be connected with a city in the making. A little overwhelmed because they'd expected a baby and found a giant, they rode slowly into the city. A man on a running mule careened crazily among the wagons, and a man driving a four-horse span hitched to a heavy wagon spoke to him in terms that are never heard in polite company. "Cover your ears, Cindy," Alec ordered. "I didn't hear a thing," Cindy said sweetly. Her eyes were big and growing bigger. A wagon piled high with lumber picked up at the railroad swerved to where some men were working frantically on a wooden building. Two of the workers, Cindy saw, were the carefree young men who had camped close to the Simpson wagon on the border and had taken little interest in anything except fun. They'd probably thought that getting land in Oklahoma was a huge joke too, and as a result they hadn't got any. Cindy supposed that most of the people who had no claims would either go back home or work for someone else.