ice they could get for it
or let it lie there to increase in value.

Some of the old-timers didn't object to this system. "When the land is
all taken up, people will have to pay more for it," they explained. But
on the whole they eyed with humorous intolerance the settlers who
departed, leaving their claims as they had found them.

A great blessing of the plains was the absence of vermin. I do not
remember having seen a rat or a weasel on the frontier at that time, and
many of the natives had never seen a potato bug or chinch bug or
cockroach.

But one day after a short, pelting rain, I came home and opened the door
and looked at the moving, crawling walls, and could not believe my eyes.
Worms--small, brown, slick worms--an inch to an inch and a half long.

The walls, the door, the ground were alive with them. They were crawling
through the cracks into the shack, wriggling along the floor and walls
with their tiny, hair-like legs. They infested the plains for miles
around. At night one could feel them crawling over the bed.

The neighbors got together to find means of exterminating these
obnoxious vermin. We burned sulfur inside and used torches of twisted
prairie hay on the outside of the house, just near enough to the walls
to scorch the creepers. But as one regiment burned up another came.

One day Ida Mary and I, in doing a little research work of our own--we
had no biologists to consult on plagues, and no exterminators--lifted up
a wide board platform in front of our shack, and ran screaming. The
pests were nested thick and began to scatter rapidly in every direction,
a fermenting mass.

They were not dangerous, they injured neither men nor crops, but they
were harder to endure than a major disaster. One was aware of them
everywhere, on the chair one sat in, on the food one ate, on one's body.
They were a crawling, maddening nightmare.

A number of homesteaders were preparing to leave the country--driven
out by an army of insects--when, as suddenly as they came, the worms
disappeared. Where they came from, where they went, no one knew. I
mention this episode as one without precedent or repetition in the
history of the frontier, so far as I know.

A number of theories were advanced regarding this worm plague. Some said
they had rained down in cell or germ form; others, that they had
developed with the sudden moisture from some peculiar embryo in the dry
soil. Finding from my own further observation that th