est of the morning I spent with
Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel, I met one of
the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office
and talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how
to put in the time until the night express was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land
was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of
early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I
felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of
autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see
the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold color I remembered so well.
Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the
wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes of
golden-rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with gold
threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over
little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to
take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the
boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along
a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble
upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had
almost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would
not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was
easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used
to lurch up out of