There was a town down the road which I had first heard discussed nigh twenty years ago by a broken-down prospector in a box-car.  ’Young feller,’ said he, after he had made a professional prophecy,’ you’ll hear of that town if you live.  She’s born lucky.’

I saw the town later—­it was a siding by a trestle bridge where Indians sold beadwork—­and as years passed I gathered that the old tramp’s prophecy had come true, and that Luck of some kind had struck the little town by the big river.  So, this trip, I stopped to make sure.  It was a beautiful town of six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a high-girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden with trees at the station.  A company of joyous men and women, whom that air and that light, and their own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came along in motors, and gave us such a day as never was.

‘What about the Luck?’ I asked.

‘Heavens!’ said one.  ’Haven’t you heard about our natural gas—­the greatest natural gas in the world?  Oh, come and see!’

I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines and machinery-shops, worked by natural gas which comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of fried onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by valves and taps is reduced to four pounds.  There was Luck enough to make a metropolis.  Imagine a city’s heating and light—­to say nothing of power—­laid on at no greater expense than that of piping!

‘Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?’ I demanded.

’Who knows?  We’re only at the beginning.  We’ll show you a brick-making plant, out on the prairie, run by gas.  But just now we want to show you one of our pet farms.’

Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please, and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself.  A Major of the Mounted Police, who had done a year at the (Boer) war, told us how the ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers by the wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing along which we rushed.  (The Prairie has nothing to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or tricky gates.)

‘After all,’ said the Major, ’there’s no country to touch this.  I’ve had thirty years of it—­from one end to the other.’

Then they pointed out all the quarters of the horizon—­say, fifty miles wherever you turned—­and gave them names.

The show farmer had taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped through his gates and reached the silent, spick-and-span house, with its trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled in the sun between two mounds of golden chaff.  Every one thumbed a sample of it and passed judgment—­it must have been worth a few hundred golden sovereigns as it lay, out on the veldt—­and we sat around, on the farm machinery, and, in the hush that a shut-up house always imposes, we seemed to hear the lavish earth getting ready for new harvests.  There was no true wind, but a push, as it were, of the whole crystal atmosphere.