Through the camp was a scene of busy life, the preparation of the evening meal being the principal duty in progress.
There appeared to rest upon all a shade of sadness, for from their number two were missing, and around their camp fires their absence was sorely felt. A few hours before, they had started forth for a gallop over the prairies, and a scout coming in reported that they had been captured by a band of Sioux Indians.
But what could be done? Night was coming rapidly on; it was camping time, and until the next day no move for their recovery could be made, for it was impossible to follow the trail of the Indians in the darkness.
The wagon train consisted of a dozen families, their teamsters and guides, moving from the boundaries of civilization to the prairies of the Far West, there to build new homes.
With one family particularly, among these daring pioneers, we will have to become friends, for they will occupy no inferior place in this romance of life on the far frontier.
In that family were five persons, consisting of Major Austin Conrad, his wife, a sad-faced matron of forty-five, a son of twenty-two, Gerald Conrad, and a daughter of seventeen, the joyous and beautiful Sibyl.
Then there was a niece of the major, and his ward, Ruth Whitfield, a dashing, brilliant-looking brunette of twenty, who had been a belle in her native city, until financial reverses had reduced her once proud parents to want, and cast her upon the bounty of her uncle.
Major Conrad was an ex-army officer, who in early life had seen much service on the frontier, but at length married his cousin and settled down to private life and the enjoyment of his riches.
But reverses had at last befallen him and he was almost crushed beneath his sorrows and misfortunes, until his brave wife begged that he would leave the scene of his troubles and find a new home far in the Western country.
New life seemed instilled into the major at the thought, and two months after found him en route for a home on the border, accompanied by his wife, his children, and his niece.