she said.

The cartoonist scrambled down from his mount and led the old,
stiff-jointed, sway-backed horse up to the door. "I would have called
sooner," he explained, sweeping off his hat in a low bow, "but I have
been breaking in my new steed. Let me introduce Hop-Along Cassidy."

It was the newspaper that had brought him, he went on to say.
"Editorially it's not so bad, but the make-up would give anyone sore
eyes." It was Van Leshout who helped with the make-up of the paper, and
he made drawings and had plates made that would do credit to any
newspaper.

He was a strange character in this setting, like an exotic plant in an
old-fashioned garden, and his eccentricities aroused considerable
amusement among the settlers, although he became in time a favorite with
them, serving as a sort of counter-irritant to the strain of pioneer
life. Men who trudged all day through the broiling sun turning furrows
in that stubborn soil were entertained by the strange antics of a man
who sat before his cabin in the shade (when there was any) painting the
Indians. It was a rare treat to hear him go on, they admitted, but he
was not to be taken seriously.

Among the subscriptions I received for _The Wand_ was one from the New
York broker, Halbert Donovan, with a letter addressed to McClure.

"Through the McClure _Press_ which I had sent me," it read, "I learned
that you are running a newspaper out on some Indian reservation. I
remember quite well the fantastic idea you had about doing things out
there with a little newspaper. But it does not seem possible you would
be so foolhardy.

"I'm afraid your aspirations are going to receive a great blow. It is a
poor place for dreams. Imagine your trying to be a voice of the
frontier, as you put it, to a bunch of homesteaders in a God-forsaken
country like that. If I can be of help to you in some way, you might let
me know. You have shown a progressive spirit. Too bad to waste it."

What I needed at the moment was to have him send me a few corporations,
but as that was unlikely, I pinned my faith in _The Wand_. It was a
seven-column, four-page paper which carried staunchly a strange load of
problems and responsibilities. In spite of the New York broker's blunt
disbelief in the possibilities of a frontier newspaper, I had become
more and more convinced during those weeks that only through some such
medium could the homesteaders express their own needs, in their own way;
have their problems