than fire leaves, it faced
the sunset and the prairie.

"That farm belonged to as hard-working, smart a feller as ever handled a
plow. Look at them fields, gone to desolation like everything else, but
the furrows used to be as straight's a line with a ruler. He fought the
hard times and the drought till his wife died, and then he said to me,
'I'm beat; I'm going to take the baby back to Winnie's folks. If I'd
only gone last year I could have took Winnie, too. The company kin have
my farm, and I hope to God it'll be the curse to them it's been to me!'
There the farm is. And look further down"--shifting the switch to
another direction--"there's another dropping to pieces. Lord, when I
think of the stories they told me about the crops when I fust came and
put in four hundred dollars that I'd worked hard for in a saw-mill, and
I think how we used to set 'round the fire evenings, my wife and I,
talking about how the town was a-growing and what it would be when the
trees was growed and our children was going to school, and how we'd have
a cabinet organ and we'd have a top buggy, and we'd send for her mother,
who didn't jest like it with Bill's wife--we was jest like children,
making believe! But that ain't what I was driving at. Here it is. We
calculated that we'd be let alone, because the poor, miserable remnants
of stock and machines and farms we got simply wasn't worth outside folks
taking, and inside folks wouldn't risk their lives by dispossessing us.
That's how we sized it up, ain't it?"

"I don't see yet what you're after, Wesley."

"You will. We reasoned that way. But along comes this company,
this--trust, that's clean against the laws and don't give a curse for
that, and it buys up the whole outfit. I tell you, Mr. Robbins, there
ain't five men in this community that that trust ain't got the legal
right to turn out on the prairies to-morrow. They've all been
foreclosed, and the year of grace is up. Most of us here ain't got no
show at all--legally. And so they send a man down here to see about
gitting out writs and finishing us up."

"But who'll they get to buy, Wesley Orr?"

"They're not needing much buying. They're on to a new scheme--going to
turn all these farms into big pastures and fatten cattle with alfalfa,
raise it and ship it; then the lower part of the county, down below
town, they intend to run a ditch through from the river and irrigate it.
They will fetch in a colony who'll pay them about ten time