d to treat as
an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his
hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and
climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through
passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little
humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me.

At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My
father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak
cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift
her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I
did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a
castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.

Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.
With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough
for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith,
however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.
"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to
sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can
regulate the water for my crops."

"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.
I have a better plan than that."

The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this
time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated
plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I
described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I
talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.

Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village
of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.
Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more
were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was
also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its
doors sagging.

Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat
burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor,
and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold
me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get
a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where
you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and l