great relief.

Ewing awoke in the night at some jolting halt of the train, to feel an
exciting thrill of luxury as he stretched in his berth. Here was no
stumbling about in the dark to search for a lost trail; nor must he rise
in the chill dawn to worry a blaze from overnight embers, cook a
discouraging breakfast, catch horses, and lade unwilling beasts with
packs. Things would be done for him; and the trail was wide and level as
befits the approach to the world. He dozed royally off feeling that he
had bitten into the heart of his wonder at last.

The following day they sped through a land whose kind he knew, but after
another night he awoke to find their train breasting the brown waves of
a sea that rolled lazily to far horizons. No longer was there one of his
beloved mountain peaks to be a landmark: only an endless, curving
lowness, as of land that had once tried to lash itself into the fury of
mountain and crag, and then ceased all effort--to lie forever impotent
and sad.

He thought of Ben amid this disconsolate welter. Ben had beheld this
sight years ago, and had described it with aversion, as one relating a
topographical scandal. Ewing favored his companion with heartfelt
dispraise of this landscape, applauding the suggestion of a woman she
laughingly quoted that "there should be a tuck taken in the continent."
He was sure nothing would be lost by it.

The lady beguiled him over the inadequacies of Kansas by promising a
better land farther on. He gladly turned from the car window to watch
the pretty play of her mouth as she talked.

But the next day--they steamed out of St. Louis in the morning--he
scanned several hundred square miles of excellent farming land with
sheer dismay. From morning till night they ran through what, to Ewing,
was a dead, depressing flatness, a vast and clumsy jest of a
checkerboard, with cornfields for squares. The tiny groves of oak at
long intervals seemed only to satirize the monotony. The rolling plains
of the day before had been vivacious beside this flatness, and there had
been a certain mournful dignity in their solitude. But this endless
level lacked even solitude. To Ewing, indeed, the mystery of it lay in
its well-peopled towns. He wondered how men kept sane there. Mrs. Laithe
insisted that it was an important stretch of our country, that it fed
thousands and made useful objects in its tall-chimneyed factories
(things like wagons and watches and boots, she believed), and t