Steering, of New York

Old Bernique, of French St. Louis

Piney, of the Woods

Crittenton Madeira, of Canaan

Sally, of Missouri

_There are also some kind-hearted people:_
_Farmers, Housewives, Store-keepers, Miners, etc._

_Chapter One_

STEERING OF NEW YORK

"Hoo-ee-ow-ohme!"

It was half a sob, half a laugh, and, half sobbing, half laughing, the
young man stopped his horse on the crest of the Tigmore Hills, in the
Ozark Uplift, raised in his stirrups, and looked the country through and
through, as though he must see into its very heart. In the brilliant
mid-afternoon light the Southwest unrolled below him and around him in a
ragged bigness and an unconquered loneliness. As far as eye could reach
tumbled the knobs, the flats, the waste weedy places, the gullies, the
rock-pitted sweeps of table-land and the timbered hills of the Uplift.
The buffalo grass trembled across the lowlands in long, shaking billows
that had all the effect of scared flight. From the base of the Tigmores
a line of river bottom stretched westward, and beyond the bottom curved
a pale, quiet river. In the distance wraiths of blue smoke falteringly
bespoke the presence of people and cabins; on a cleared hill an object
that might be horse or dog or man was silhouetted, small and vague; and
in the farthest west the hoister of a deserted zinc mine cut up against
the sky a little lonely way. The near and dominant things were
constantly those tremulous, fleeing billows of grass, the straight
strong trees, the sullen rocks, the silent, shivering water.

"_Hoo-ee-ow!_"

It was too vast, too urgent. Waiting, ready, it lay there aggressively,
like a challenge. As the young man faced it, it claimed him, forcing
back his past life, his old habits, his old haunts, into the realm of
myth and moonshine. His old habits! His old haunts! They hung aloof in
his consciousness, shadow pictures, colourless and remote.... That
zestful young life at New Haven, the swift years of it, the fine last
day of it, Yale honours upon him, his enthusiasms cutting away into the
future, his big shoulders squared, his face set toward great things, the
righting of wrongs, grand reforms, the careers of nations.... A bachelor
hotel; a club whose windows looked out on the avenue; an office where
Carington and he had pretended to work down on Nassau Street;
drawing-rooms where Carington and he had pretended to be in love, on
various