as if to aid the boomer by showing how deep the black loam was.

Everybody was in holiday mood. Men whistled and sang and shouted and
toiled--toiled terribly--and yet it did not seem like toil! They sank
wells and ploughed gardens and built barns and planted seeds, and yet
the whole settlement continued to present the care-free manners of a
great pleasure party. It seemed as if no one needed to work, and,
therefore, those first months were months of gay and swift progress.

It was the most beautiful spring Blanche and Willard Burke had spent
since their marriage nine years before. Blanche forgot to be petulant or
moody. She was in superb health, and carried herself like a girl of
eighteen. She appeared to have lost all her regrets.

She laughed heartily when Rivers came over one afternoon and boldly
declared:

"Burke, I've c'me to borrow your wife. We've got a lot o' tenderfoots
over there to-night, and I'm a little shy of Bailey's biscuits. I'm
going to carry your cook away."

"All right; only bring her back."

Blanche was a little embarrassed when Rivers replied: "I don't like to
agree to do that. Mebbe you'd better come over to make sure I do."

"All right. I'll come over in time for supper." Burke's simple, good
face glowed with enjoyment of the fun. He smilingly went back to beating
his plough-share with hammer and wedge as Rivers drove away with
Blanche. The clink of his steel rang through the golden light that
flooded the prairie, keeping time to his whistled song.

In the months of April and May the world sent a skirmish-line into this
echoless land to take possession of a belt of territory six hundred
miles long and one hundred miles broad. The settlers came like locusts;
they sang like larks. From Alsace and Lorraine, from the North Sea, from
Russia, from the Alps, they came, and their faces shone as if they had
happened upon the spring-time of the world. Tyranny was behind them, the
majesty of God's wilderness before them, a mystic joy within them.

Under their hands the straddle-bug multiplied. He is short-lived, this
prairie insect. He usually dies in thirty days--by courtesy alone he
lives. He expresses the settlers' hope and sense of justice. In these
spring days of good cheer he lived at times to sixty days--but only on
stony ground or fire-scarred, peaty lowlands.

He withered--this strange, three-legged, voiceless insect--but in his
stead arose a beetle. This beetle sheltered human beings, a