so many visions of spending my life, with a more or less clearly-seen wife—­especially during those days after Rowena Fewkes had told me how well she could cook, and proved it by getting me my breakfast; and the later days of my stay in the Grove of Destiny with Virginia Royall.  Any open prairie farm, with no house, nothing with which to make a house, and no home but a wagon, and no companions but my cows would have been rather forbidding at first glance; but this—­I was certain I was ruined; I suppose I must have looked a little bad, for Henderson L. laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t cave in, my boy,” said he.  “You’re young—­and there’s oceans of good land to be had.  Keep a stiff upper lip!”

“I’ll kill him!” I shouted.  “I’ll kill John Rucker!”

“Don’t, till you catch him,” said Burns.  “And what good would it do anyhow?”

“Is there any plow-land on it?” I asked, after getting control of myself.

“Some,” said Henderson L. cheerfully.  “Don’t you remember that we drove up over a spur of the hill back there?  Well, all the dry land north of our track is yours.  Finest building-spot in the world, Jake.  We’ll make a farm of this yet.  Come back and I’ll show you.”

4

So we went back and looked over all the dry ground I possessed, and agreed that there were about forty acres of it, and as Burns insisted, sixty in a dry season; and he stuck to it that a lot of that slew was as good pasture especially in a dry time as any one could ask for.  This would be fine for a man as fond of cows as I was, though, of course, cows could range at will all over the country.  It was fine hay land, he said, too, except in the wettest places; but it was true also, that any one could make hay anywhere.

I paid Henderson L., bade good-by to Magnus Thorkelson, drove my outfit up on the “building-spot,” and camped right where my biggest silo now stands.  I sat there all the afternoon, not even unhitching my teams, listening as the afternoon drew on toward night, to the bitterns crying “plum pudd’n’” from the marsh, to the queer calls of the water-rail, and to the long-drawn “whe-e-ep—­whe-e-e-ew!” of the curlews, as they alighted on the prairie and stretched their wings up over their backs.

I could never be much of a man, I thought, on a forty-acre farm, nor build much of a house.  I had come all the way from York State for this!  The bubble had grown brighter and brighter as I had made my strange way across the new lands, putting on more and more of the colors of the rainbow, and now, all had ended in this spot of water on the floor of the earth.  I compared myself with the Fewkeses, as I remembered how I had told Virginia just how the rooms of the house should be arranged, and allowed her to change the arrangement whenever she desired, and even to put great white columns in front as she said they did in Kentucky.  We had agreed as to just what trees should be set out, and what flowers should be planted in the blue-grass lawn.