he stream. All this, after the
college had found an abiding place on the limestone ridge. For Sunrise
had been a migratory bird before reaching the outskirts of Lagonda
Ledge. As a fulfillment of prophecy, it had arisen from the visions and
pockets of some Boston scholars, and it had come to the West and was
made flesh--or stone--and dwelt among men on the outskirts of a booming
young Kansas town.
Lloyd Fenneben was just out of Harvard when Dr. Joshua Wream, his
step-brother, many years his senior, professor of all the dead languages
ever left unburied, had put a considerable fortune into his hands, and
into his brain the dream of a life-work--even the building of a great
university in the West. For the Wreams were a stubborn, self-willed,
bookish breed, who held that salvation of souls could come only through
possession of a college diploma. Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with
all his youth and health and money, with high ideals and culture and
ambition for success and dreams of honor--and, hidden deep down, the
memory of some sort of love affair, but that was his own business. With
this dream of a new Harvard on the western prairies, he had burned his
bridges behind him, and in an unbusiness-like way, relying too much upon
a board of trustees whom he had interested in his plans he had eagerly
begun his task, struggling to adapt the West to his university model,
measuring all men and means by the scholarly rule of his Alma Mater.
Being a young man, he took himself full seriously, and it was a
tremendous blow to his sense of dignity when the youthful Jayhawkers at
the outset dubbed him "Dean Funnybone"--a name he was never to lose.
His college flourished so amazingly that another boom town, farther
inland, came across the prairie one day, and before the eyes of the
young dean bought it of the money-loving trustees--body and soul and
dean--and packed it off as the Plains Indians would carry off a white
captive, miles away to the westward. Plumped down in a big frame
barracks in the public square of twenty acres in the middle of this new
town, at once real estate dealers advertised the place as the literary
center of Kansas; while lots in straggling additions far away across the
prairie draws were boomed as "college flats within walking distance of
the university."
In this new setting Lloyd Fenneben started again to build up what had
been so recklessly torn down. But it was slow doing, and in a downcast
hour the
|