"I'm on my way to Ft. Pierre and I am lost! I am trying to reach the Cedar Creek settlement for the night."
"You can't make it, stranger, if you don't know the country," Ida Mary called out.
"Well, what have I struck?" he asked, perplexed.
"A trading post."
"A trading post! It sounded like an opera house."
"We don't know who you are," Ida Mary called through the thin wall of the shack, "but you can't get on tonight in this snow. Tie your horse in the hayshed and we will fix you a bed in the store."
Next morning the girls rolled down the ladder one at a time, clothes in hand, to dress by the toy stove while Ida Mary and I started the wheels of industry rolling. When breakfast was ready we called in our strange guest.
When he asked for his bill we told him we were not running public lodgings but that we took in strangers when it was dangerous for them to go on.
After that Ida Mary always left a lamp burning low in the kitchen window, and the little print shop, set on the high tableland, served as a beacon for travelers who were lost on the plains.
Many a night stranded strangers sought shelter at the Ammons settlement. No other trading center in the middle of a reservation was run by girls, so strangers took it for granted that there were men about, or if they knew we were alone they did not think of our being unarmed in that country where guns had been the law.