at country where things a man plants
in the ground grows up and comes to something. They went into this
pe-rairie and started a bustin' it up like the ones ahead of 'em did.
Shucks! you can turn a ribbon of this blame sod a hundred miles long and
never break it. What can a farmer do with land that holds together that
way? Nothin'. But them fellers planted corn in them strips of sod,
raised a few nubbins, some of 'em, some didn't raise even fodder. It run
along that way a few years, hot winds cookin' their crops when they did
git the ground softened up so stuff would begin to make roots and grow,
cattle and horses dyin' off in the winter and burnin' up in the fires
them fool fellers didn't know how to stop when they got started in this
grass. They thinned out year after year, and I drove around over the
country and picked up their bones.

"That crowd of settlers is about all gone now, only one here and there
along some crick. Bones is gittin' scarce, too. I used to make more
when I got four dollars a ton for 'em than I do now when they pay me
ten. Grind 'em up to put on them farms back in the East, they tell me.
Takin' the bones of famine from one place to put on fat in another.
Funny, ain't it?"

The traveler said it was strange, indeed, but that it was the way of
nature for the upstanding to flourish on the remains of the fallen. The
bone man nodded, and allowed that it was so, world without end,
according to his own observations in the scale of living things from
grass blade to mankind.

"How are they coming in now--by the trainload?" the traveler asked,
reverting to the influx of settlers.

"These seem to be a different class of men," the bone man replied, his
perplexity plain in his face. "I don't make 'em out as easy as I did the
ones ahead of 'em. These fellers generally come alone, scoutin' around
to see the lay of the country--I run into 'em right along drivin' livery
rigs, see 'em around for a couple or three weeks sometimes. Then they go
away, and the first thing I know they're back with their immigrant car
full of stuff, haulin' out to some place somebody went broke on back in
the early days. They seem to be a calculatin' kind, but no man ain't
deep anough to slip up on the blind side of this country and grab it by
the mane like them fellers seems to think they're doin'. It'll throw
'em, and it'll throw 'em hard."

"It looks to me like it would be a good country for wheat," the traveler
said.

"Wheat!