The Newtown bee., 1908-02-21

tion. Amid the cheers Of riyerman, cattlemen and cowboys, the iron horse pulled our train out of town, where only a quarter of a century ago grazed herds of buffalo and the wild Indian roamed the prairies,
 This new line between Fort Pierre and Rapid City passes thirteen towns, only two of which, Philip and Midland, had places in which service could be held. So We jOurneyed to Midland and completed oGs arrangements there for q Sunday evening service, posting our bills, selecting an organist and choir. Then we engaged livery team and started for some of the interior range towns. We drove our speedy team all afternoon, making a wide detour to carry letter woman in Midland gave us to brave mother who is sup- porting her small brood of children by keeping a shack store and section-line post-oflice. The letter was to tell her of our service the following Sunday evening in Midland. Her face lighted up as if she had read the good news of fortune left her, so eager are some in this new, vast, sparsely-settled coun- try to hear that the "good news" of the Church is to be told to spiritually starved souls!
 We drove about thirty-five miles,
 arriving at Hayes, our first place to hold service, late in the afternoon.
 Hayes is a sort of pivot-point for prairie roads leading everywhere. It is on the famous "Deadwood trail, !"
 along which the freighters used to
 bring the gold from the Black Hills to the nearest railroad point at Pierre,
 not so many years ago. Hayes proud ly boasts of a general store, hotel, a small school-house, newspaper office
 (the whole plant housed in an 8 10 shack), a saloon, a barn and the store keepers bungalow. The people come from surrounding ranches and shacks. Unlike the east, coming to town does not mean six or seven miles, but per- haps thirty, forty miles or more. Serv- ices were usually held in the hotel parlor, room about X 10, which, with the furnishings-a piano, table and two chairs-left little room to turn around in. We persuaded the kindly, but weary landlady to allow us to clean up fair-sized, but very dirty, much littered-up outer room, which had until recently served as post-office and gen. eral lounging-room, for our temporary chapel. The landlady eyed us at first with mild suspicion, gazing with an ex- pression of fuctuating anxiety at our high-banded waistcoats, but finally de- claring: "Go ahead and please your selves. 'Piscopalians sure need more room than Presbyterians" !" E~
 Having persuaded a lady, stopping at the hotel on the way to her home- stead, and by rare good fortune mu- sician, to play, and selecting the hymns and rehearslng them with her, we turned our attention to the room and soon had 1t swept out, the chairs and benches dusted and arranged pew fash ion. A former cigar-case was made to serve both as lectern and pulpit. Two bracket lamps, a standard lamp and a lantern, were distributed about to give adequate light. After these hurried ar- engagements were completed 1 discov- cred that Bishop Johnson was out in the road, near the store, greeting. with unceremonious but quiet cordiality, all the people about and inviting them to the service after supper. l could not but note with admiration how adaptive he was. Bishop Johnson is the westerner's ideal of a man, de- scribed in the true and sincere meaning of their complimentary phrase-"a good mixerp" Time and again some honest, frank, awkward, nervy cattle man has said to me, tossing his head toward the bishop: "He is bishop, hey?" Then with forceful gesture: "Humph! 1 don't know nuthin' much bout bishops, but he sure is white!' And w hite' defines the cattleman's code of moral fitness in man.
 That evening in Hayes settled down as dark as Erebus-and no spot can be darker than prairie country on a dark night. Everything seemed to fall away into space and all trails were plotted from sight. Despite this fact and the great distances between the homesteaders' shacks and the cattle men s ranches, about thirty people came out to service, a large congregation for the mid-week in a western town. We had vested in our rooms upstairs Ia part of the low garret, partitioned off with boards from canned goods boxes) and on coming downstairs we met congregation whose faces re- vealeds surprise expectancy. Four