e.

In fact, Jim, who drove both routes on this day, and who peeped into the
coach whenever he stopped to water, soliloquized that two fools with
idees would make a quare span ef they had a neck-yoke on.

CHAPTER III.

LAND AND LOVE.

Mr. Minorkey and the fat gentleman found much to interest them as the
coach rolled over the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing a
slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend had any particular
interest in the beautiful outline of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness
of the water-willows that grew along the river edge, and whose paler
green was the prominent feature of the landscape, or in the sweet
contrast at the horizon where grass-green earth met the light blue
northern sky. But the scenery none the less suggested fruitful themes for
talk to the two gentlemen on the back-seat.

"I've got money loaned on that quarter at three per cent a month and five
after due. The mortgage has a waiver in it too. You see, the security was
unusually good, and that was why I let him have it so low." This was what
Mr. Minorkey said at intervals and with some variations, generally adding
something like this: "The day I went to look at that claim, to see
whether the security was good or not, I got caught in the rain. I
expected it would kill me. Well, sir, I was taken that night with a
pain--just here--and it ran through the lung to the point of the
shoulder-blade--here. I had to get my feet into a tub of water and take
some brandy. I'd a had pleurisy if I'd been in any other country but
this. I tell you, nothing saved me but the oxygen in this air. There!
there's a forty that I lent a hundred dollars on at five per cent a month
and six per cent after maturity, with a waiver in the mortgage. The day I
came here to see this I was nearly dead. I had a--"

Just here the fat gentleman would get desperate, and, by way of
preventing the completion of the dolorous account, would break out with:
"That's Sokaska, the new town laid out by Johnson--that hill over there,
where you see those stakes. I bought a corner-lot fronting the public
square, and a block opposite where they hope to get a factory. There's a
brook runs through the town, and they think it has water enough and fall
enough to furnish a water-power part of the day, during part of the year,
and they hope to get a factory located there. There'll be a territorial
road run through from St. Paul next spring if they can get a bill thro