amiliar, called out, "Hello,
Bill"--adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for
forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn
with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are
Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"

"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going
to sell out next year and come back here."

They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"

"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.

"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods
together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"

This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very
well,--but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her
own folks."

"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.

In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York,
well pleased with my plan.

After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about
to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It
meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the
woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but
the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new
word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had
little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the
Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had
swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now
the day of reckoning had come.

CHAPTER XXXIV

We Go to California

The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a
proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My
love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to
plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a
lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and
bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of
safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life--a little
solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my
family could catch and cling.

All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of
American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers,
daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were eve