as,
turning his attention to the oxen again.

Having said a few words appropriate to the occasion of starting up, he
flung out his bullwhip in a flourish of aerial penmanship and drove
home the aforesaid remarks with a startling report. Again the bovine
procession got under way.

In the course of time he came to where Claxton road ends and Claxton
Road begins. It will be recalled that Claxton road, hemmed in by barb
wire, leads interminably past vacant stretches of prairie with
occasionally a farm and farmhouse. Nearing town its scene and
atmosphere suddenly change. On the left are the ranchmen's home
estates, with the stables and windmills and short avenues of
china-berry trees leading up to comfortable porches; to the right, or
facing these, is a large square of green with no roadside houses and no
longer any confining fence. To any one who had come a long distance
between the barb wires, this emergence upon the free, open common was
very much as if he had been following a stream which, after long
confinement to its course, opens out suddenly into a lake. This piece
of land was not different from the prairie it had always been, except
that the houses which faced it on all sides, as if it were a lake of
the summer-resort variety, gave it an importance which was not its own.
It was no more nor less than a square of primeval prairie whose owner,
being satisfied with it, let it be as it was. Surrounded on all sides
by real estate and other improvements, it held its own as immovably as
if Texas had here taken her last stand, in hollow square, against the
encroachments of civilization. It belonged to Jonas Hicks. In the
exact middle of it was the paintless frame house which we have already
mentioned.

This structure is easily described. It consisted of a house with one
room downstairs and one room upstairs. Its boarding was of the kind
that runs up and down with battening strips at the cracks. Any one
familiar with prairie architecture would see at once that the owner,
having a house to build, had gone straightway to work and erected a
herder's shack on a residential scale and put some windows in it.
Because of its porchlessness it seemed rather tall, as if it had grown
after it was built or had stretched itself up to get a better view; and
the single window in the end of the upper story gave it a watchful
appearance. This watchful window, which might be said to mark its
front, looked toward the residences