CHAPTER 6THE AFTERNOON TRAIN was in and Bruce Powell paused on the hotel gallery to watch Glen Keith herding the newly arrived settlers up the muddy street.
There were only some twenty today, following the land agent like so many sheep. Yet Powell knew that for all their sheeplike actions the settlers were individuals, each brought westward by his dream of a new land, a new opportunity.
Each week they poured from the crowded East, forced on by the same restlessness which had led Powell and his brother to ride up the trail from Texas. It was all part of the same great movement, a wave of migration set off in the war-weary nation by the need for new hope and new wealth as he spoke. And he missed the little breathless catch in her voice as she asked,
“What has this man Daigle to do with th
