that ran through the home place. These he had saved for a new beginning, but the exposure of his efforts to rescue his cattle cost his own life, leaving his wife and daughter in worse case than they would have been if the last head had perished in the storm.
Neither of the women—Eudora was nineteen then—knew anything about cattle, and they soon were to find that indifference working for ignorance is a wasteful combination. The seed saved from the wreckage at such great cost did not increase as it should have done. There were leaks somewhere which kept the herd down, and Mrs. Ellison, after two years of disappointment, wisely decided to sell what cattle remained before all of them leaked away.
She cleaned them out, to the last living hoof, and put the money aside for taxes and living expenses, Ellison having been a thrifty man and leaving no debts. But that fund from the sale of the remainder of the herd could not last a great while with nothing coming in to help. The fields which Ellison had tilled, growing his own corn, lay fallow, the encroaching prairie sod around their borders closing in on them like growing ice upon a lake.
Now the bone market had opened, and Eudora was gathering the dried skeletons, heaping a vast mound of them in the barnyard, her intention being to collect several carloads and then have them hauled to Drumwell, the nearest railroad point, some forty miles away. It was a melancholy business at the best, doubly so when every horned skull was a counter in the tale of their ruinous loss. If she had been picking up the bones of somebody else's cattle it would not have been so bad, even though
