ft had been given him for a single mile. Now, mounting
a ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, which
had appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattened
out to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag,
flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with a
large turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.

His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West,
lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soul
above corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently,
of an anger slow to move. There were bright hues as of glistening metal
in his close-cut light hair as he stood bareheaded in the sun.

Sheep sorrel was blooming by the wheel tracks of the road, purple and
yellow; daisy-like flowers, with pale yellow petals and great wondering
hearts like frightened eyes, grew low among the short grass; countless
strange blooms spread on the prairie green, cheering for their brief day
the stern face of a land that had broken the hearts of men in its
unkindness and driven them away from its fair promises. The traveler
sighed, unable to understand it quite.

All day he had been passing little sod houses whose walls were
crumbling, whose roofs had fallen in, whose doors beckoned in the wind a
sad invitation to come in and behold the desolation that lay within.
Even here, close by the road, ran the grass-grown furrows of an
abandoned field, the settler's dwelling-place unmarked by sod or stone.
What tragedy was written in those wavering lines; what heartbreak of
going away from some dear hope and broken dream! Here a teamster was
cutting across the prairie to strike the road a little below the point
where the traveler stood. Extra side boards were on his wagon-box, as
they used to put them on in corn-gathering time back in the traveler's
boyhood home in Indiana. The wagon was heaped high with white, dry
bones.

Bones. Nothing left to haul out of that land but bones. The young man
took up his valise and hat and struck off down the road to intercept the
freighter of this prairie product, hoping for an invitation to ride,
better pleased by the prospect of resting living bones on dead dry ones
than racking them in that strain to reach the town on the railroad, his
journey's end, on foot before nightfall.

The driver's hat was white, like his bones; it drooped in weather-beaten
limpne