meager library and other college equipments and walked ten miles across
the plains to hire a man with a team to haul them away. The teamster had
much ado to drive his half-bridle-wise Indian ponies near enough to
the university doorway to load his wagon. Before the threshold a huge
rattlesnake lay coiled, already disputing any human claim to this
kingdom of the wild.

Discouraging as all this must have been to Fenneben, when he started
away from the deserted town he smiled joyously as a man who sees his
road fair before him.

"I might go back to Cambridge and poke about after the dead languages
until my brother passes on, and then drop into his chair in the
university," he said to himself, "but the trustee was right. I can never
build the East into the West. But I can learn from the East how to bring
the West into its own kingdom. I can make the dead languages serve me
the better to speak the living words here. And if I can do that, I
may earn a Master's Degree from my Alma Mater without the writing of a
learned thesis to clinch it. But whether I win honor or I am forgotten,
this shall be my life-work--out on these Kansas prairies, to till a soil
that shall grow MEN AND WOMEN."

For the next three years Dean Fenneben and his college flourished on
the borders of a little frontier town, if that can be called flourishing
which uses up time, and money, and energy, Christian patience, and
dogged persistence. Then an August prairie fire, sweeping up from the
southwest, leaped the narrow fire-guard about the one building and
burned up everything there, except Dean Fenneben. Six years, and nothing
to show for his work on the outside. Inside, the six years' stay
in Kansas had seen the making over of a scholarly dreamer into a
hard-headed, far-seeing, masterful man, who took the West as he found
it, but did not leave it so. Not he! All the power of higher learning he
still held supreme. But by days of hard work in the college halls, and
nights of meditation out in the silent sanctuary spaces of the prairies
round about him, he had been learning how to compute the needs of men as
the angel with the golden reed computed the walls and gates of the New
Jerusalem--_according to the measure of a man_.

Such was Dean Fenneben who came after six years of service to the little
town of Lagonda Ledge to plant Sunrise on the crest above the Walnut
Valley beyond reach of prairie fire or bursting boom. Firm set as the
limestone of its fo