etween
him and his thoughts.

He lay in a dilapidated chair beside the stove, and the little bare
room through which its pipe ran was permeated with the smell of fresh
shavings, hot iron, and the fumes of indifferent tobacco. A
carpenter's bench ran along one end of it, and was now occupied by a
new wagon pole the man had fashioned out of a slender birch. A Marlin
rifle, an ax, and a big saw hung beneath the head of an antelope on the
wall above the bench, and all of them showed signs of use and glistened
with oil. Opposite to them a few shelves were filled with simple
crockery and cooking utensils, and these also shone spotlessly. There
was a pair of knee boots in one corner with a patch partly sewn on to
one of them, and the harness in another showed traces of careful
repair. A bookcase hung above them, and its somewhat tattered contents
indicated that the man who had chosen and evidently handled them
frequently, possessed tastes any one who did not know that country
would scarcely have expected to find in a prairie farmer. A table and
one or two rude chairs made by their owner's hands completed the
furniture, but while all hinted at poverty, it also suggested neatness,
industry and care, for the room bore the impress of its occupier's
individuality as rooms not infrequently do.

It was not difficult to see that he was frugal, though possibly from
necessity rather than taste, not sparing of effort, and had a keen eye
for utility, and if that suggested the question why with such
capacities he had not attained to greater comfort the answer was
simple. Winston had no money, and the seasons had fought against him.
He had done his uttermost with the means at his disposal, and now he
knew he was beaten.

A doleful wind moaned about the lonely building, and set the roof
shingles rattling overhead. Now and then the stove crackled, or the
lamp flickered, and any one unused to the prairie would have felt the
little loghouse very desolate and lonely. There was no other human
habitation within a league, only a great waste of whitened grass
relieved about the homestead by the raw clods of the fall plowing, for,
while his scattered neighbors for the most part put their trust in
horses and cattle, Winston had been among the first to realize the
capacities of that land as a wheat-growing country.

Now, clad in well-worn jean trousers and an old deerskin jacket, he
looked down at the bundle of documents on his knee, acco