"

The bone man pulled up on his horses, checking them as if he would stop
and let this dangerous fellow off. He looked at the traveler with
incredulous stare, into which a shading of pity came, drawing his
naturally long face longer. "I'd just as well stop and let you start
back right now, mister." He tightened up a little more on the lines.

There was merriment in the stranger's gray eyes, a smile on his homely
face that softened its harsh lines.

"Has nobody ever tried it?" he inquired.

"There's been plenty of fools here, but none that wild that I ever heard
of," the bone man said. "You're a hundred miles and more past the
deadline for wheat--you'd just as well try to raise bananers here.
Wheat! it'd freeze out in the winter and blow out by the roots in the
spring if any of it got through."

The traveler swept a long look around the country, illusive, it seemed,
according to its past treatment of men, in its restful beauty and secure
feeling of peace. He was silent so long that the bone man looked at him
again keenly, measuring him up and down as he would some monstrosity
seen for the first time.

"Maybe you're right," the young man said at last.

The bone man grunted, with an inflection of superiority, and drove on,
meditating the mental perversions of his kind.

"Over in Ascalon," he said, breaking silence by and by, "there's a
feller by the name of Thayer--Judge Thayer, they call him, but he ain't
never been a judge of nothin' since I've knowed him--lawyer and land
agent for the railroad. He brings a lot of people in here and sells 'em
railroad land. He says wheat'll grow in this country, tells them
settlers that to fetch 'em here. You two ought to git together--you'd
sure make a pair to draw to."

"Wouldn't we?" said the stranger, in hearty humor.

"What business did you foller back there in Ioway?" inquired the bone
man, not much respect in him now for the man he had lifted out of the
road.

"I was a professional optimist," the traveler replied, grave enough for
all save his eyes.

The bone man thought it over a spell. "Well, I don't think you'll do
much in Ascalon," he said. "People don't wear specs out here in this
country much. Anybody that wants 'em goes to the feller that runs the
jewelry store."

The stranger attempted no correction, but sat whistling a merry tune as
he looked over the country. The bone man drove in silence until they
rose a swell that brought the town of Ascalon into vie