SILAS:  I’m going to get it out of my hands.

GRANDMOTHER:  Get it out of your hands? (he has it now) Deed your father got from the government the very year the government got it from the Indians?

(rising) Give me that! (she turns to FEJEVARY) Tell him he’s crazy.  We got the best land ’cause we was first here.  We got a right to keep it.

FEJEVARY:  (going soothingly to her) It’s true, Silas, it is a serious thing to give away one’s land.

SILAS:  You ought to know.  You did it.  Are you sorry you did it?

FEJEVARY:  No.  But wasn’t that different?

SILAS:  How was it different?  Yours was a fight to make life more, wasn’t it?  Well, let this be our way.

GRANDMOTHER:  What’s all that got to do with giving up the land that should provide for our own children?

SILAS:  Isn’t it providing for them to give them a better world to live in?  Felix—­you’re young, I ask you, ain’t it providing for them to give them a chance to be more than we are?

FELIX:  I think you’re entirely right, Uncle Silas.  But it’s the practical question that—­

SILAS:  If you’re right, the practical question is just a thing to fix up.

FEJEVARY:  I fear you don’t realize the immense amount of money required to finance a college.  The land would be a start.  You would have to interest rich men; you’d have to have a community in sympathy with the thing you wanted to do.

GRANDMOTHER:  Can’t you see, Silas, that we’re all against you?

SILAS:  All against me? (to FEJEVARY) But how can you be?  Look at the land we walked in and took!  Was there ever such a chance to make life more?  Why, the buffalo here before us was more than we if we do nothing but prosper!  God damn us if we sit here rich and fat and forget man’s in the makin’. (affirming against this) There will one day be a college in these cornfields by the Mississippi because long ago a great dream was fought for in Hungary.  And I say to that old dream, Wake up, old dream!  Wake up and fight!  You say rich men. (holding it out, but it is not taken) I give you this deed to take to rich men to show them one man believes enough in this to give the best land he’s got.  That ought to make rich men stop and think.

GRANDMOTHER:  Stop and think he’s a fool.

SILAS:  (to FEJEVARY) It’s you can make them know he’s not a fool.  When you tell this way you can tell it, they’ll feel in you what’s more than them.  They’ll listen.

GRANDMOTHER:  I tell you, Silas, folks are too busy.

SILAS:  Too busy!’ Too busy bein’ nothin’?  If it’s true that we created ourselves out of the thoughts that came, then thought is not something outside the business of life.  Thought—­(with his gift for wonder) why, thought’s our chance.  I know now.  Why I can’t forget the Indians.  We killed their joy before we killed them.  We made them less, (to FEJEVARY, and as if sure he is now making it clear) I got to give it back—­their hill.  I give it back to joy—­a better joy—­joy o’aspiration.