teadily day by day, but it gave
signal for no watching enemy. All about stretched the pale green ocean
of the grasses, dotted by many wild flowers, nodding and bowing like
bits of fragile flotsam on the surface of a continually rolling sea. The
little groves of timber, scattered here and there, sheltered from the
summer sun the wild cattle of the plains. The shorter grasses hid the
coveys of the prairie hens, and on the marsh-grown bayou banks the wild
duck led her brood. A great land, a rich, a fruitful one, was this that
lay about these adventurers.

A soberness had come over the habit of the master mind of this little
colony. His hand took up the ax, and forgot the sword and gun. Day after
day he stood looking about him, examining and studying in little all the
strange things which he saw; seeking to learn as much as might be of
the timorous savages, who in time began to straggle back to their ruined
villages; talking, as best he might, through such interpreting as was
possible, with savages who came from the west of the Messasebe, and from
the South and from the far Southwest; hearing, and learning and
wondering of a land which seemed as large as all the earth, and various
as all the lands that lay beneath the sun--that West, so glorious, so
new, so boundless, which was yet to be the home of countless
hearth-fires and the sites of myriad fields of corn. Let others hunt,
and fish, and rob the Indians of their furs, after the accepted fashion
of the time; as for John Law, he must look about him, and think, and
watch this growing of the corn.

He saw it fairly from its beginning, this growth of the maize, this
plant which never yet had grown on Scotch or English soil; this tall,
beautiful, broad-bladed, tender tree, the very emblem of all
fruitfulness. He saw here and there, dropped by the careless hand of
some departed Indian woman, the little germinating seeds, just thrusting
their pale-green heads up through the soil, half broken by the tomahawk.
He saw the clustering green shoots--numerous, in the sign of plenty--all
crowding together and clamoring for light, and life, and air, and room.
He saw the prevailing of the tall and strong upthrusting stalks, after
the way of life; saw the others dwarf and whiten, and yet cling on at
the base of the bolder stem, parasites, worthless, yet existing, after
the way of life.

He saw the great central stalks spring boldly up, so swiftly that it
almost seemed possible to count