sperous appearing ranches.

"Millionaires row," he chuckled. "They don't pay interest, but they're
real wild and western when it comes to frills. Further up the line
you'll see somethin' rich, perhaps."

The promised attraction was a young gentleman in a silk shirt and white
flannels following a plow down a furrow, and in turn followed by an
aristocratic-looking bulldog. "The dawg," explained my companion, "is
blue blood Borston. His pedigree's a heap longer than mine and valued at
more thousand dollars than I dare tell. His boss there has a daddy worth
a million or so, and when he himself ain't farmin' he scoots around in a
five-thousand-dollar ortermobile. But mostly he plays rancher an' makes
hay an' beds down the hawses an' all the rest of it. It's a queer game.
Crazy's what I call it. There's a whole nest of 'em hereabouts."

So we saw the un-idle rich laboring in the fields. In the nature of
things the old-timers regard the species with amusement, figuring, now
and then, how many cuttings of alfalfa it would take to pay for the
Boston bull, and attempting to determine why anyone with an income
should elect such an existence, with the wide world at their beck!

This was my introduction to the land of great distances--twenty odd
hours of toil over rolling plains of sagebrush, green-floored valleys,
timbered hill lands, always--their indelible influence is the first
impression of the newcomer whose outlook is a fraction higher than the
earth he treads--always with the mountains of the western skyline
dominating whatever panorama presented itself. Peaks turbaned with
white, tousled foothills, olive green, their limitless forests of pine
surging upward from the level of the sage-carpeted, juniper-studded
plains. The land of many miles, and of broad beautiful views, is
Oregon's hinterland.

Many miles? Aye, truly. My friend Kinkaid drives his auto trucks to
Burns, one hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. Southwards to
Silver Lake is another truck line, ninety miles long, which daily bears
Uncle Sam's mails to the inland communities, a notable example of the
pioneering of this age of gasolene. Each morning automobiles start from
Bend, the railroad's end, for paltry jumps of from fifty to three
hundred miles, and the passengers drink their final cup of coffee with
the indifference a Staten Island dweller accords a contemplated trip
across the bay.

Viewed sanely, the contempt for distances is appalling--at leas