ail.

"We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that
you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies
necessary to complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay
you for the serial besides."

The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire
authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous.
They set me free. They gave me wings!--For the first time in my life I
was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car,
and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of
my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the
bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did
so with elation--with a sense of conquest?

Eager to explore--eager to know every state of the Union and especially
eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started
westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the
mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride
started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails."

On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of
rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched
protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed
through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended
barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known
leaders in the field.

Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those
whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm
life were in no wise softened by these experiences.

How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and
twenty-six cent cotton--these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and
silos!

As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates
and places--and no wonder, for I was doing something every moment (I
travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that
summer does stand clearly out--that of a meeting with my father at Omaha
in July.

It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my
father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I
distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel
and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the
_Arena_ I had come to know many of the most prominent men in