If Molly ain't in a wagon of her own, it ain't his fault, anyways! I'll rest assured it's account of Molly's going out to Oregon that he's going too! Well!" And again, "Well!" "Who's the other fellow, though ?" demanded Jed.

"I can't place him this far." Jesse Wingate handed over his team to his son and stepped out into the open road, moved his hat in an impatient signal, half of welcome, half of command.

It apparently was observed.
To their surprise, it was the unidentified rider who now set spur to his horse and came on at a gallop ahead of the train.

He rode carelessly well, a born horseman.

In no more than a few minutes he could be seen as rather a gallant figure of the border cavalier--a border just then more martial than it had been before '46 and the days of "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight." A shrewed man might have guessed this young man--he was no more than twenty-eight--to have got some military air on a border opposite to that of Oregon; the far Southwest, where Taylor and Scott and the less known Doniphan and many another fighting man had been adding certain thousands of leagues to the soil of this republic.