Late in the afternoon Joe came up with the wagon and the children. He had been faithful to his trust. Sue Belle was very much frightened when she learned that her husband had secured a claim. She knew he would endeavor to hold it, and she feared extremely for him lying ill and alone on the prairie. Leaving the children in the care of some of the women who had followed their husbands on the trail, with the promise of the whole town that her three lots would be held inviolate for her, accompanied by her two faithful, self-constituted guardians, she mounted the refreshed Kentucky again and rode back to her husband, lying alone, half delirious, in his shed on the prairie, clinging desperately to his quarter section. Thus the tide changed at last and now came flooding in with fortune. PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMAN THE END OF A FRONTIER TELL "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." THE BIBLE There were but two women in the camp, Martie was one of them, and Martie was the cause of it. The statement that it was on account of her they quarrelled, and it was through the quarrel the terrible state of affairs was brought about, cannot be denied. Martie and her mother--her mother was the other woman in the camp, and, except that she had been responsible for Martie years before, she didn't particularly count--had come to the rough little mining settlement with Martie's father, a mining engineer, who represented certain speculative holdings in the East which needed personal attention. Before they arrived the camp had been a fairly peaceable one: the boys got drunk just about so often, once in a while there was a shooting affair, but Medicine Dog was as orderly a camp as might have been found in Colorado, until Martie came. It was a serpent, I believe, that introduced the trouble in the Garden of Eden. I wonder what the wild beasts thought of the advent of Eve. At any rate, Martie first reformed and then disorganized Medicine Dog. Following her arrival there was an ebullition of "boiled shirts,"--come by express in response to telegraphic communications with Denver, the first evidence of the reform. This was followed by the influx of a lone Chinaman, imported for the reboiling of the said shirts, his life, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of his vocation over the tubs being guaranteed him by the camp, the second evidence of the reform. There was a consequent amelioration of manners, proportioned to the prevalence of shirt bosom, too. "Boiled shirts"--I use the language of the camp--are the beginning of that civilization of which "plug hats" are the end. Medicine Dog never got that far, except in its dreams; even Martie was not quite equal to promoting the "plug hat."