dead brave's
favorite horse, feeling he would course the plains of Heaven in peace.
Now, I find, they have their doubts, and they pick out a dying old
bone-yard whose day is over, or an outlaw that nobody can break and
ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It's the same with us
whites. Here we are, us two, with--"

But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the
sake of seeing it bend.

"Can you imagine anything lovelier," I remarked as a derailer, "than
the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?"

Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of
sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.

"Think of LaVerendrye, who was their Columbus," he meditated aloud.
"Going on and on, day by day, week by week, wondering what was beyond
that world of plain and slough and coulee and everlasting green! And
they tell me there's four hundred million arable acres of it. I wonder
if old Verendrye ever had an inkling of what Whittier felt later on:

'I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of cities yet to be--
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.'"

Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given him an entirely false
idea of the prairie, since from the Bryant poem he'd expected to see
grass up to his armpits. And he'd been disappointed, too, by the
scarcity of birds and flowers.

But I couldn't let that complaint go by unchallenged. I told him of
our range-lilies and foxglove and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot
and wild sunflowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets in
some sections. "And the prairie-grasses, Peter--don't forget the
prairie-grasses," I concluded, perplexed for a moment by the rather
grim smile that crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face.

"I'm not likely to," he remarked.

For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to cut hay. He has
been speaking of it as going into the wilderness for meditation. But
what he's really doing is taking a team and his tent and supplies and
staying with that hay until it's cut, cut and "_collected_," to use
the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into these parts.

I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues that's sending
Peter out into his wilderness. But I've been busy getting his grub-box
ready and I can at least see that he fares well. For whatever happens,
we mu