The boards were
a foot wide, thus making the inside of the shaft ten inches
square. This one was forty or fifty feet deep, but there was a
long rope and slender tin bucket beside it. The water was not
good, but there was no other to be had. Near the house Ollie
found the first cactus we had seen, which showed, if nothing else
did, that we were getting into a dry country. He took it up
carefully and stowed it away in the cabin to take back home as
evidence of his extensive travels.
For several days we had not been able to have a camp-fire,
owing to the wind and dryness of the prairie, for had we started
a prairie fire it might have done great damage.
"We don't want the Holt County Anti-Prairie Fire Society
after us," Jack had said; so we bad been using our oil-stove.
But this evening was very still, and there seemed to be no
danger in building a camp-fire within the walls of the house, and
we soon had one going with wood which we had gathered along the
river, since to have found wood enough for a camp-fire in that
neighborhood would have been as impossible as to have found a
stone or a spring of water.
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