Evidently they had come from Jimtown.

Wagons are as interesting sights on a prairie as they are uninteresting in a city, so the boys shifted their course slightly that they might investigate.

And these were the rarest wagons that crawled across the plains, for they carried a show! During the many months that Whitey had been in the West only one show had come to the Junction, and that at a time when Injun and Whitey had been hunting in the mountains.

Lives there a boy with soul so dead that he does not hunger for a show?
I leave you to answer that, and to guess how hungry Whitey was for one.
But if you have in your mind any big, gilded wagons, with pictures of beautiful women on their sides, and drawn by many prancing white horses with red plumes on their heads, get that vision right out of your mind.
These were "prairie schooners," covered with old, weather-beaten canvas, creaking along on wheels on which mud had long taken the place of paint, and drawn by mules! And the only things to indicate their character were letters painted on the old canvas sides, where they drooped between the wooden arches that supported them; letters which read: "The Mildini Troupe.

Pride of the West." And that was enough.