She slept,—and sleeping, walked in the cool of the maples and oaks in the Big Woods, picked anemones and creamy white Mayflowers. She dropped down in a bed of cool ferns behind Janet Graves’ house in the timber. Suddenly, the wagon creaked and lurched and she opened her eyes. Hurriedly sitting up, only half cognizant of where she was, she looked out through the canvas. The sun shone hot on the flat prairie. Blow, . . . wave, . . . ripple, . . . dip. . . . An intense nausea seized her,—the mal de mer of the prairie-schooner passenger lurching over the hot, dry inland sea.

Later in the forenoon they sighted a fringe of trees against the unclouded sky. It seemed an oasis,—or was it a mirage to vanish when they should come to it?

“The Weeping Water,” Henry Lutz called back. And they knew they were getting near to the new home.

They crossed the shallow, winding stream not far from a stone mill. A man with milk-pails in his hands paused to watch the cavalcade. Will, walking by his ox team, was wet to the boot-tops.

The man grinned and called out jovially: “You’ve got your baptism of the new country now. You’re branded. You’ll never go back.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Will called out with equal jocosity. Abbie in the wagon almost moaned from nausea, heat and homesickness.

On the other side of the stream there stood a team of oxen hitched to a covered wagon so odd-looking, that even Abbie sat up in interest. The wagon-box was a rowboat painted a gaudy blue, the bow curving toward the stolid oxen’s buttocks, the stern forming the base of the rear canvas doorway. A man with his wife and two babies waited for the others to come up. Gus Reinmueller, he said his name was, and jerking an indifferent thumb toward his wife, he gave a laconic, “My voman, Christine.”

Christine seemed as stolid as the oxen, her face as patiently expressionless. One could not have told whether she was old or young. Her colorless hair was braided in small braids and wound flat from ear to ear, looking like a small oval-shaped rug pinned on the back of her head.

This was the third family, then, to be going up into the same section with the Deals. And together, after a lunch, the wagons journeyed on to the west. In a long, straggling line they journeyed stolidly and silently toward the sun. Of them all, only Sarah Lutz sometimes called out a cheery comment. Abbie lay on the wagon bottom, so ill with nausea and heat, that it seemed she could never again take any interest in life.

Toward evening another long fringe of trees penciled itself against the dipping sun.

“Stove Creek,” Henry Lutz called back. And they knew they were at their destination.

There were old buffalo wallows along the creek banks, shallow declivities, where the huge beasts had rolled and stamped out the mud. The sight of buffalo chips, too, reminded them that the time was not long past since the shaggy fellows had ambled leisurely along the creek bed. They crossed the creek, which was little more than a ravine now, with its few inches of water. And then Henry Lutz, who was in the lead, stopped.