as she turned back to the house}

At the ketchen door, and while the coyote's cry was still reverberating across the paairie, she was seized with a sudden overwhelming premonition.

In her absorption in her work, she had forgotten Dodo;

It was more than an hour since she had last seen the child going down the lane that divided the grain fields;

She called the baby's name aloud, her shrill voice echoing back strangely from the cluster of brightly painted red and white buildings that were about a hundred feet from the ranch- house. A sickening apprehension of she knew not what tore at the mother's heart; as she ran from the house to the barn she called:

"Dodo! Dodof Do ~— do—o~o-o~l"

The barn was empty of stock, for the work and saddle horses were all in the field and the milk cows had not yet been driven to the cow shed. A number of hens were clucking busily in the horse stalls.

The mother ran through the main barn and into the cowshed. She peered into the saddle room and the oat bin and she ran from stall to stall; She climbed to the hay loft and searched everywhere for her baby, and all the time she called her by name. From the hay loft window she scanned the barnyard, and

coming down from the loft she went from building to building;

The implement house, stripped for the summer*s work, the blacksmith

shop, the granaries, the tool house, the piggery, the chicken

houses, the well house -- from one to the other sped the frantic

Woman, and then back to the ranchhouse, around it on all sides