A Prairie-Schooner Princess

A Prairie-Schooner Princess

CHAPTER I

THE STRANGERS


From under the curving top of a canvas-covered "prairie schooner" a boy
of about fifteen leaned out, his eyes straining intently across the
brown, level expanse of the prairies.

"Father," he called, with a note of anxiety in his voice, "look back
there to the northeast! What is that against the horizon? It looks
like a cloud of dust or smoke."

In a second prairie schooner, just ahead of the one the boy was driving,
a man with a brown, bearded face looked out hastily, then continued to
scan the horizon with anxious gaze.

Beside him in the wagon sat a blue-eyed, comely woman with traces of
care in her face. As the boy’s voice reached her she started, then
leaned out of the wagon, her startled gaze sweeping the lonely untrodden
plains over which they were traveling.

Inside the wagon under the canvas cover a boy of nine, two little girls
of seven and twelve, a curly-headed little girl of five, and a baby boy
of two years, lay on the rolled-up bedding sleeping heavily.