een De Bussey and a side-delivery
horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a
banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina
and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it's a relief to converse about
something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and
tractor-oil and cows' teats. And it's a stroke of luck to capture a
farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that
he campaigns against the domestic weed!

_Thursday the Eleventh_

We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the
westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of
ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little
Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up
the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps,
toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking
brother was _not_ hidden in the cellar!

Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and
try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are
without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them
out in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn't so picturesque as
breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn't so thrilling to the eye as a
shooting-iron, so it's mostly the blood-and-thunder type of westerners,
from the ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing through
picture and story, advertising us as an aggregation of train-robbers
and road-agents and sheriff-rabbits. And it's a type that makes me
tired.

The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and the cowboy is going
after it. Even the broncho, they tell me, is destined to disappear. It
seems hard to think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang which
Dinky-Dunk once told me was the descendant of the three hundred Arab
and Spanish horses which Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to
Mexico. For we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb-wire,
and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called our "stink-wagon" to turn
the grass upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once
wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I
find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the
eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost,
we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring u