ddle west almost entirely to myself. Not
one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame,
and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a
single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward
White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth
Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing
her stories of Arkansas life for _Scribners_ but had published only one
book.

Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except
perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came
from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the
west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so
grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by
posterity."

In short, I was assured that my face was set in the right direction and
that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and
thirty-one is a most excellent period of life!

And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the
death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she
was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the
lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for her was no
longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged
defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to
permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a
radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the
letter telling of her passing, my mind was irradiated with the picture
she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship
had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the
day of my security, her place was empty.

CHAPTER XXXII

The Spirit of Revolt

During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in
Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of
Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was
taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement
which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was
finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the
corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and
the old time politicians were uneasy.

As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest we