the paper?"

"Wyoming. The Rawhide country. Just send the paper to Lost Trail. I'll
be goin' on there. I know a cattleman around Lost Trail."

Rawhide country. Lost Trail. About them was the atmosphere of far-flung
space, of solitude and peace.

"I may go there myself some day," I told him.

"If you do," he said soberly, "leave this doggone newspaper shebang
behind. It's a pest to the country. Don't clutter up any more range with
homesteadin' herds. Worse than grasshoppers; at least the grasshoppers
leave, and the homesteaders appear to be here to stay."

He rode off, a strange, solitary figure, topped the ridge and dropped
out of sight as swiftly as he had appeared that first morning, stopping
the eagle in its flight. When he had gone I turned back to my article.
In this gigantic homestead project, _The Wand_ declared, there should be
protection. We demanded of the local land offices why the Department of
the Interior did not establish Service Bureaus on government territory
to expedite development, to lessen hardship and danger. But the Land
Offices could not help us. They were only the red-tape machines of the
Public Lands Department.

The federal government was taking in revenue by the millions from the
homesteaders. Millions of acres of homestead land at from $1.25 to $6 an
acre provided a neat income for the United States Treasury. And, we
contended, the homesteaders of America should be given consideration.
There was nothing radical about these articles, but here again I became
known as "that little outlaw printer."

Had I been experienced, I might have carried this appeal to Washington
and said, "Put the revenue from these lands back into them. That is not
charity, it is development of natural resources."

Any such entreaty, coming from an upstart of a girl printer, would have
been like a lamb bleating at a blizzard. But the homesteaders might have
been organized as a unit, with official power to petition for aid. I did
not know then that I could do such things.

Meantime the print shop buzzed with activity. The harvest of proofs, on
which I had gambled the paper, was on. It kept one person busy with the
clerical work on them. While the Strip was yet a no-man's land, I had
pledged the printing equipment company 400 proofs as collateral. That
was a low estimate. As a matter of fact _The Wand_ won an all-time
record, publishing in one week 88 proofs, the highest number ever to be
published in any issue o