Scotty was a very English Englishman, with an inborn love of fine horse-flesh and a guileless nature.  Some years before he had fallen into the hands of a promoter, and had bartered a goodly proportion of his worldly belongings for a horse-ranch in Dakota, to be taken possession of immediately.  Long indeed was the wail which went up from his home in Sussex when the fact was made known.  Neighbors were fluent in denunciation, relatives insistent in expostulation; his wife, and in sympathy their baby daughter, copious in the argument of tears; but the die was irrevocably cast.  Go he would,—­not from voluntary stubbornness, but because he must.

The actual departure of the Bakers was much like the sailing of Columbus.  Probably not one of the friends who saw them off for their new home expected ever to see the family again.  Indians they were confident were rampant, and frantic for scalps.  Should any by a miracle escape the savages, the tremendous herds of buffalo, running amuck, here and there, could not fail to trample the survivors into the dust of the prairie.  By comparison, war was a benignant prospect; and sighs mingled until the sound was as the wailing of winds.

Scotty was very cheerful through it all, very encouraging even in the face of incontestibly unfavorable evidence, until, with the few remnants of civilization they had brought with them, the family arrived at the wind-beaten terminus, a hundred miles from his newly acquired property.  Then for the first time he wilted.

“I’ve been an ass,” he admitted bitterly, as he glanced in impotent contempt at the handful of weather-stained buildings which on the map bore the name of a town; “an ass, an egregious, abominable, blethering ass!”

But, notwithstanding his lack of the practical, Scotty was made of good stuff.  It was not an alternative but a necessity that faced him now, and he arose right manfully to the occasion.  Despite his wife’s assertion that she “never, never would go any farther into this God-forsaken country,” he succeeded in getting her into a lumber-wagon and headed for what he genially termed “the interior.”  At last he even succeeded in making her smile at his efforts to make the disreputable mule pack-team he had secured move faster than a walk.

Once in possession of his own, however, he returned to his customary easy manner of life.  It took him a very short time to discover that he had purchased a gold brick.  Horses, especially fine horses, were in no demand there; but this fact did not alter his course in the least.  A horse-ranch he had bought, a horse-ranch he would run, though every man west of the Mississippi should smile.  He enlarged his tiny shack to a cottage of three rooms; put in floor and ceiling, and papered the walls.  Out of poles and prairie sod he fashioned a serviceable barn, and built an admirable horse paddock.  Last of all he planted in his dooryard, in artistic irregularity, a wagon-load of small imported trees.  The fact that within six months they all died caused him slight misgiving.  He at least had done what he could to beautify the earth; that he failed was nature’s fault, not his.