MARY ELLEN Lifting and shimmering mysteriously in the midday sun, as though tantalizing any chance traveller of that wide land with a prospect alluring, yet impossible, the buildings of the Halfway station now loomed large and dark, now sank until they seemed a few broken dots and dashes just visible upon the wide gray plain.

Yet soon the tall frame of the windmill showed high above the earth, most notable landmark for many a mile, and finally the ragged arms of the corral posts appeared definitely, and then the low peak of the roof of the main building.
For miles these seemed to grow no closer, but the steady trot of the little horses ate up the distance, and Franklin found himself again at the spot with which he was already so well acquainted that every detail, every low building and gnarled bit of wood, was tabulated surely in his mind.

The creak of the windmill presently came to his ears as a familiar sound, but rasping and irritating on his strong nerves as the croak of the elder Fate.
Franklin drove up to the great dugout which made the main building, in front of which the soil had been worn bare and dusty by many hoofs.
The Halfway House was now a business enterprise of assured success.
Many signs of prosperity appeared to the eye accustomed to the crude simplicity of the frontier.

These immigrants from the far-off South, incongruous and unfitted as they had seemed in this harsh new country, had apparently blundered into a material success far beyond that of their average neighbour.

The first years, the hardest ones of their struggle, were past, and the problem of existence was solved.