u couldn't buy one of 'em at any price,' I said. 'There's two
reasons. I wouldn't do business with a horse-thief and no money would
tempt me to sell an animal to be ridden to death.'

"The two thieves had had enough of us and they got out."

* * * * *

That night our party camped on the shore of the Kankakee and next day
they met the contractors. Lincoln joined the latter party and Harry and
Samson went on alone. Late that afternoon they crossed the nine mile
prairie, beyond which they could see the shimmer of the lake and the
sunlit structures of the new city. Pink and white moccasin flowers and
primroses were thick in the grass. On the lower ground the hoofs of their
horses plashed in wide stretches of shallow water.

Chicago looked very bare on the high prairie above the lake. It was Mr.
William Cullen Bryant who said that it had the look of a huckster in his
shirt-sleeves.

"There it is," said Samson. "Four thousand, one hundred and eighty people
live there. It looks like a sturdy two-year-old."

The houses were small and cheaply built and of many colors. Some were
unpainted. Near the prairie they stood like people on the outer edge of
a crowd, looking over one another's shoulders and pushing in a disordered
mass toward the center of interest. Some seemed to have straggled away as
if they had given up trying to see or hear. So to one nearing it the
town had a helter-skelter look.

Our travelers passed rough boarded houses with grand-looking people in
their dooryards and on their small porches--men in broadcloth and tall
hats and ladies in silk dresses. It was six o'clock and the men had come
home to supper. As the horsemen proceeded larger buildings surrounded
them, mostly two stories high. There were some stores and houses built of
red brick. Beyond the scatter of cheap, wooden structures they came to
streets well laid out and crowded and busy and "very soft" to quote a
phrase from the diary. Teams were struggling in the mud, drivers shouting
and lashing. Agents for hotels and boarding-houses began to solicit the
two horsemen from the plank sidewalks. The latter were deeply impressed
by a negro in scarlet clothes, riding a horse in scarlet housings. He
carried a scarlet banner and was advertising in a loud voice the hour and
place of a great land sale that evening.

A sound of many hammers beating upon boards could be heard above the
noises of the street and behind all was the