This was forty acres, and would have a mortgage on it.  I waited a day or so, and told him I wouldn’t take it.  What I was afraid of was the mortgage; but I didn’t give my reasons.  Then he came back with a vacant lot in Madison, and then three vacant lots, which I went and looked at, and found in a swamp.  Then I told him I wanted money or farm land; and he offered me a lead mine near Mineral Point.  All the time he was getting more and more worried and excited; he used to tremble when he talked to me; and as the winter wore away, and the season drew nearer when he wanted to go on his travels, or deal with the properties in which I had found out by this time he was speculating with my mother’s money, just as everybody was speculating then, in mines, town sites, farm lands, railway stocks and such things, he was on tenter-hooks, I could see that, to get rid of me, whom he thought he had given the slip forever.  Finally he came to me one morning, just as a warm February wind had begun to thaw the snow, and said, beaming as if he had found a gold mine for me:  “Jacob, I’ve got just what you want—­a splendid farm in Iowa.”

And he laid on the table the deed to my farm in Vandemark Township, a section of land in one solid block a mile square.  “Of course,” said he, “I can’t let you have all of it—­’but let us say eighty acres, or even I might clean up a quarter-section, here along the east side,”—­and he pointed to a plat of it pinned fast to the deed.

“The whole piece,” said I, “is worth eight hundred dollars, and not a cent more—­if it’s all good land.  That ain’t enough.”

“All good land!” said he—­and I could see he was surprised at the fact that I knew Iowa land was selling at a dollar and a quarter an acre.  “Why, there ain’t anything but good land there.  You can put a plow in one corner of that section, and plow every foot of it without taking the share out of the ground.”

“All or nothing,” said I, “and more.”

Next day he came back and said he would let me have the whole section; but that it would break him.  He wanted to be fair with me—­more than fair.  People had set me against him, he said, looking at Jackway who was-drinking at the bar; but nobody could say that he was a man who would not deal fairly with an ignorant boy.

“I’ve got to have a team, a wagon, a cover for the wagon, and provisions for the trip,” I said, “and a few hundred dollars to live on for a while after I get to Iowa.”

At this he threw his hands up, and left me, saying that if I wanted to ruin him I would have to do it through the courts.  He had gone as far as he would go, and I would never have another offer as generous as he had made me.  The next day I met on the street the red-headed girl, who went by the name of Alice Rucker, and was notorious as a medium.  She stopped me, and asked why I hadn’t been to see her—­carrying the conversation off casually, as if we had been ordinary acquaintances.  All I could say—­for I was a little embarrassed, was “I do’ know”—­which was what I had told Rucker and Jackway, in answer to a thousand questions, until they were crazy to know how to come at me.