as level as a floor,
and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars
leaping and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged
down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where
blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from
the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams.

Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it
seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it
was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year
before.

It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for
his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel,
but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk
across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon
a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse--and I was at once
intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along
the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The
ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless
change of leadership took place.

There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm,
despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the
satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the
outposts,--sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from
the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of
wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the
north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually
took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father
was at this very moment busy in founding his new home.

My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination
looking into the future, supplied the trees and vines and flowers which
were to make this land a garden.

I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father
had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of
Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land.

CHAPTER XXI

The Grasshopper and the Ant

Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant,
was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the
fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James
allured me