h offered material
of surpassing value to the novelist who could use it. Humor and pathos,
tragic bitterness and religious exaltation were all within reach of my
hand.

The spring nights which came to me there at Colony were of a quality
quite new to me. The breeze, amiable and moist, was Southern, and the
moonlight falling from the sky like a silent, all-enveloping cataract of
silver, lay along the ground so mystically real that I could feel it
with my hand. The air was at once tropic and Western, and this subtle
blending of the North and the South, the strange and the familiar,
appealed to me with such power that I wrote Zulime a statement of my
belief that in becoming a part-owner in this land, I had assured for us
both a happy and prosperous future. "I shall come here every spring," I
declared, and in the glow of this enthusiasm, I purchased another farm
of two hundred and forty acres and arranged with Seger for its
management.

Alas, for my piece of mind! On my way homeward, at Reno, I encountered a
simoon of most appalling power. An equatorial wind which pressed against
the car and screamed at the window--a hot, unending pitiless blast
withering the grain and tearing the heart out of young gardens--a storm
which brought back to me the dreadful blizzard of dust which swept over
our Iowa farm in the spring of '72. There was something grand as well as
sorrowful in this unexpected display of desert ferocity.

My dream of a thousand-acre ranch shriveled with the plants. The prairie
abandoning its youthful, buoyant air, took on a sinister and savage
grandeur. To escape from the ashes of these ruined fields was now a
passionate desire. The value of my land in Washitay fell almost to the
vanishing point. Illinois became a green and pleasant pasture toward
which I drove with gratitude and relief.

[I insert a line to say that this was only a mood. I went on with my
purchase of lands till I had my thousand acres, but these acres were in
scattered plots and the house with the patio and the porch was never
built.]

At the Agency just before I left for the North I had hired some Cheyenne
women to make for me a large council teepee which I had in mind to set
up as my dwelling at Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime and I had agreed to
spend the summer. Boyishly eager to reproduce as well as I could a
Cheyenne house, I assembled all my blankets, parfleches, willow beds and
other furnishings and raised my lodge on poles on the e