The cowman, the railroad man, and the gambling man had gone, leaving behind them the wide and well-perforated Cottage, the graveyard with its double street, the cattle chutes with well-worn, hairy walls.
Now there came upon the face of the country faint scars where wheels had cut into the hard soil, these vagrant indices of travel not pointing all one way, and not cut deep, as was the royal highway of the cattle, but crossing, tangling, sometimes blending into main-travelled roads, though more often straying aimlessly off over the prairie to end at the homestead of some farmer.

The smokes arose more numerously over the country, and the low houses of the settlers were seen here and there on either hand by those who drove out over the winding wagon ways in search of land.

These new houses were dark and low and brown, with the exception that each few miles the traveller might see a small frame house painted white.

Sometimes, in the early morning, there might be seen wandering toward these small white houses, no man knew whence, small groups of little beings never before seen upon the range.

At nightfall they wandered back again.