Le
ffacase faded from my mind and I was aware of the grass only as a cause
for selling our excellent pemmican.

I won't say I didnt read the occasional accounts of the weed appearing
in _Time_ or the newspapers, or watch films of it in the movies with
more than common interest, but it was no longer an engrossing factor in
my life. I was now taken up with larger concerns, working furiously to
expand my success and for a year after leaving the _Intelligencer_ I
doubt if I gave it more than a minute's thought a day.

_37._ The band of salt remained an impregnable bulwark. Where the winter
rains leached it, new tons of the mineral replaced those washed away.
Constant observation showed no advance; if anything the edge of the
grass impinging directly on the salt was sullenly retreating. The
central bulk remained, a vast, obstinate mass, but most people thought
it would somehow end by consuming itself, if indeed this doom were not
anticipated by fresh scatterings of salt striking at its vitals as soon
as the rains ceased.

No more than any other reader, then, was I disquieted by the following
small item in my morning paper:

FREAK WEED STIRS SPECULATION

San Diego, Mar 7. (AP) An unusual patch of Bermuda grass discovered
growing in one of the city parks' flower beds here today caused an
excited flurry among observers. Reaching to a height of nearly four
feet and defying all efforts of the park gardeners to uproot it, the
vivid green interloper reminded fearful spectators of the plague
which over ran Los Angeles two years ago. Scientists were
reassuring, however, as they pointed out that the giantism of the
Los Angeles devil grass was not transmissible by seed and that no
stolons or rhizomes of the abnormal plant had any means of traveling
to San Diego, protected as it is by the band of salt confining the
Los Angeles growth.

I was even more confident, for I had seen with my own eyes the shoots
grown by Miss Francis from seeds of the inoculated plant. A genuine
freak, this time, I thought, and promptly forgot the item.

Would have forgotten it, I should say, had I not an hour later received
a telegram, RETURN INSTANTLY CAN USE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF NEW GRASS
LEFFACASE. I knew from the fact he had only used nine of the ten words
paid for he considered the situation serious.

The answer prompted by impulse would, I knew, not be transmitted by the
telegraph company and on