“Sell nex’ week fer six.”

The young man’s mind had already left the subject under discussion, and it took some little effort of recollection to bring it back.

“How long will it keep on going up?” he asked.

“Tell it teches the top.  Come daown then like a spile-driver in a hurry.  Higher it goes, the wuss it’ll mash anybody what happens to stan’ percisely under it.”

“When will it reach the top?”

The Superior Being turned his eyes full upon the student, who blushed a little under the half-sneer of his look.

“Yaou tell!  Thunder, stranger, that’s jest what everybody’d pay money tew find out.  Everybody means to git aout in time, but—­thunder!—­every piece of perrary in this territory’s a deadfall.  Somebody’ll git catched in every one of them air traps.  Gee up!  G’lang! Git up, won’t you?  Hey?” And this last sentence was ornamented with another magnificent writing-master flourish of the whip-lash, and emphasized by an explosive crack at the end, which started the four horses off in a swinging gallop, from which Jim did not allow them to settle back into a walk until they had reached the high prairie land in the rear of the town.

“What are those people living in tents for?” asked the student as he pointed back to Red Owl, now considerably below them, and which presented a panorama of balloon-frame houses, mostly innocent of paint, with a sprinkling of tents pitched here and there among the trees; on lots not yet redeemed from virgin wildness, but which possessed the remarkable quality of “fetching” prices that would have done honor to well-located land in Philadelphia.

“What they live that a-way fer?  Hey?  Mos’ly ’cause they can’t live no other.”  Then, after a long pause, the Superior Being resumed in a tone of half-soliloquy:  “A’n’t a bed nur a board in the hull city of Red Owl to be had for payin’ nur coaxin’.  Beds is aces.  Houses is trumps.  Landlords is got high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands.  Looky there!  A bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory.”  And he pointed to the old steamboat “Ben Bolt,” which was just coming up to the landing with deck and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.

But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer.  It marks an epoch in a man’s life when he first catches sight of a prairie landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota.  Charlton had crossed Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed the flat prairies.  His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature superadded.

“What a magnificent country!” he cried.

“Talkin’ sense!” muttered Jim.  “Never seed so good a place fer stagin’ in my day.”