and led
the way to the Terriberry House.

Crowheart found itself in the position of the boy at the double-ringed
circus who suffers from the knowledge that there is something he must
miss. It could not give its undivided attention to the strangers and at
the same time attend the funeral of old Edouard Dubois, which was to be
held under the auspices of the beneficiary society of which he had been
a member.

To extend the warm, western hand of fellowship to the Homeseekers and
find out where they came from, what their business was, and how much
money they had was a pleasure to which the citizens of Crowheart had
long looked forward, but also it was a pleasure and a duty to walk down
the Main street in white cotton gloves and strange habiliments,
following the new hearse. The lateness of the train had made it
impossible to do both.

They were a different type, these Homeseekers, from the first crop of
penniless adventurers who had settled Crowheart, being chiefly shrewd,
anxious-eyed farmers from the Middle West who prided themselves upon
"not owing a dollar in the world" and whose modest bank accounts
represented broiling days in the hay field and a day's work before dawn,
by lantern light, when there was ice to chop in the watering trough and
racks to be filled for the bawling cattle being wintered on shares.

A trip like this had not been undertaken lightly by these men, but
Mudge's alluring literature had stirred even their unimaginative minds,
and the more impulsive had gone so far as to dispose of farming
implements and stock that they might send for their families without
delay when the purchase of the land was consummated.

In the long journey across the plains, one man had been tacitly assigned
the position of spokesman for the excursionists. He was big, this
prosperous looking stranger who seemed so unconscious of his leadership,
as big as Andy P. Symes himself, and as muscular. He was a western type,
yet he differed noticeably from his companions in that his clothes
fitted him and his cosmopolitan speech and manner were never acquired in
Oak Grove, Iowa. His eyes were both humorous and shrewd. He compelled
attention and deference without demanding it. They explained him with
pride, the Homeseekers, to inquiring citizens of Crowheart.

"That fellow? Why he controls all kinds of money beside what he's got
himself; cattleman, banker, land, money to burn. He's representin' some
farmers from his section that w