r the bench. With a short laugh he
threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once in a
while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and sowing,
and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the frosts left
him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide.
They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those scorching
dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the
blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the
yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear,
then the coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the wick.
It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found swinging to his
own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after they have become too
careless and discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut
their throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy, but
the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men that have
cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years to try to be
happy in a country as flat and gray and naked as the sea. It is not easy
for men that have spent their youth fishing in the Northern seas to be
content with following a plow, and men that have served in the Austrian
army hate hard work and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains,
and long for marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty
barmaids. After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy
for him to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always taken
liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his first year
of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky
after a while, and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier
and surer. He was a big man and with a terrible amount of resistant
force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine
years of drinking, the quantities he could tak