head of the board of trustees took council with the young dean.

"Funnybone, that's what the boys call you, ain't it?" The name had come
along over the prairie with the school. "Funnybone, you are as likely
a man as ever escaped from Boston. But you're never going to build the
East into the West, no more'n you could ram the West into the Atlantic
seaboard states. My advice to you is to get yourself into the West for
good and drop your higher learnin' notions, and be one of us, or beat it
back to where you came from quick."

Dean Fenneben listened as a man who hears the reading of his own
obituary.

"You've come out to Kansas with beautiful dreams," the bluff trustee
continued. "Drop 'em! You're too late for the New England pioneers who
come West. They've had their day and passed on. The thing for you to do
is to commercialize yourself right away. Go to buyin' and sellin' dirt.
It's all a man can do for Kansas now. Just boom her real estate."

"All a man can do for Kansas!" Fenneben repeated slowly.

"Sure, and I'll tell you something more. This town is busted, absolutely
busted. I, and a few others, brought this college here as an investment
for ourselves. It ain't paid us, and we've throwed the thing over. I've
just closed a deal with a New Jersey syndicate that gets me rid of every
foot of ground I own here. The county-seat's goin' to be eighteen
miles south, and it will be kingdom come, a'most, before the railroad
extension is any nearer 'n that. Let your university go, and come with
me. I can make you rich in six months. In six weeks the coyotes will be
howlin' through your college halls, and the prairie dogs layin' out
a townsite on the campus, and the rattlesnakes coilin' round the
doorsteps. Will you come, Funnybone?"

The trustee waited for an answer. While he waited, the soul of the young
dean found itself.

"Funnybone!" Lloyd repeated. "I guess that's just what I need--a funny
bone in my anatomy to help me to see the humor of this thing. Go with
you and give up my college? Build up the prosperity of a commonwealth
by starving its mind! No, no; I'll go on with the thing I came here to
do--so help me God!"

"You'll soon go to the devil, you and your old school. Good-by!" And the
trustee left him.

A month later, Dean Fenneben sat alone in his university barracks and
saw the prairie dogs making the dust fly as they digged about what had
been intended for a flower bed on the campus. Then he packed up his