silent line of earth's innumerable welded obstacles. He
grieved, but knew not why he grieved. He yearned, but named no cause.

To this young man, ardent, energetic, malcontent, there appeared the
vision of wide regions of rude, active life, offering full outlet for
all the bodily vigour of a man, and appealing not less powerfully to
his imagination. This West--no man had come back from it who was not
eager to return to it again! For the weak and slothful it might do to
remain in the older communities, to reap in the long-tilled fields, but
for the strong, for the unattached, for the enterprising, this unknown,
unexplored, uncertain country offered a scene whose possibilities made
irresistible appeal. For two years Franklin did the best he could at
reading law in a country office. Every time he looked out of the
window he saw a white-topped wagon moving West. Men came back and told
him of this West. Men wrote letters from the West to friends who
remained in the East. Presently these friends also, seized upon by
some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their
affairs and departed for the West. Franklin looked about him at the
squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous
and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around
him. He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun. It
seemed to him that somewhere out in the vast land beyond the Missouri
there beckoned to him a mighty hand, the index finger of some mighty
force, imperative, forbidding pause.

The letter of Battersleigh to his friend Captain Franklin fell
therefore upon soil already well prepared. Battersleigh and Franklin
had been friends in the army, and their feet had not yet wandered apart
in the days of peace. Knowing the whimsicality of his friend, and
trusting not at all in his judgment of affairs, Franklin none the less
believed implicitly in the genuineness of his friendship, and counted
upon his comradeship as a rallying point for his beginning life in the
new land which he felt with strange conviction was to be his future
abiding place. He read again and again the letter Battersleigh had
written him, which, in its somewhat formal diction and informal
orthography, was as follows:

"_To Capt. Edw. Franklin, Bloomsbury, Ill._

"MY DEAR NED: I have the honour to state to you that I am safely
arrived and well-established at this place, Ellisville, and am fully
di