s. It's a fight
for existence all the way round, this living in Kansas."

Her companion was a man with iron-gray hair, a professor of an Eastern
college who had come West, planted what money he had in real estate
and lost it. He, however, still retained part of the real estate.

He frequently lounged about the office for an hour or two during the
day, waiting for the mail, good enough company except that he
occasionally interfered with the reading of the postal cards.

He looked up from a New York newspaper, three days old.

"Pioneer people," he observed laconically, "must expect to fight
everything from real estate agents to buffaloes."

The Post Mistress laid down her sewing. Her official duties were not
arduous. They left her between trains ample time to attend to those of
her household, sewing and all, also to embroider upon bits of gossip
caught here and there in regard to her scattered neighbors whose
lights of nights were like so many stars dotting the horizon.

She looked out the window to where a tall lank farmer was tying a mule
to the hitching post. Over the high wheel of the old blue cart he
turned big hollow eyes her way.

"I hope he won't come before the train gets in," she sighed. "There
ain't no letter for him, I hope he won't come. Sometimes I feel like I
just can't tell him there ain't no letter for him."

"Who is it?" asked the Professor.

"Seth Lawson," she answered.

The Professor elevated his eyebrows.

"The man who owns the ground on which they are to build the Magic
City?" he asked laughingly.

"It may happen," declared the Post Mistress tartly. "Anything is
liable to happen in Kansas, the things you least expect."

"Everything in the way of cyclones, you mean," put in the Professor.

"Cyclones and everything else," affirmed the Post Mistress. "No matter
what it is, Kansas goes other States one better. She raises the
tallest corn--they have to climb stepladders to reach the ears--and
the biggest watermelons in the world."

"When she raises any at all," the Professor inserted.

"They say," began the Post Mistress, "that in the Eastern part of the
State, where they are beginning to be civilized, when a farmer plants
his watermelon seed, he hitches up his fastest team and drives into
the next county for the watermelon, it grows so fast. Even then,
unless he has a pretty fast team somebody else gets it. If you find
one on your claim, you know, it's yours."

"I've heard that story