the shack, after that drive
from Pierre, across parched earth, seeing the ruined crops, passing
settlers' homes which from the outside looked like the miserable huts
one sees along waterfronts or in mean outskirts of a city where the
flotsam of humanity live. And cluttered around them, farm machinery,
washtubs, and all the other junk that could be left outdoors, with
countless barrels for hauling water, and the inevitable pile of tin
cans. It was dreary, it was unrelievedly ugly; above all, it looked like
grim failure.

Earnestly I faced him. "We aren't done," I told him. "We've just
begun--badly, I know, but we can fallow. Make reservoirs. Put down
artesian wells." I completely forgot, in putting these possibilities of
the Strip before him, to mention the gas and oil deposits which we had
discovered during our frantic search for water. I did not think of
saying, "We have natural gas here--let's go and look at the Ben Smith
ranch with all its buildings piped with gas. And over on the Carter
place a drill came up from a shallow hole sticky with oil." But the
minds of the settlers were so focused elsewhere that little had been
said about these things. With an investment broker interested in mining
projects under my very roof, many of us might have become rich and the
Brule prosperous in no time.

Development of agriculture, to my mind, was of broader importance than
oil strikes, anyhow. "Men do put money into undeveloped things," I said.
"Eastern capitalists risk millions in undeveloped mines and oil fields
in the West. This is different. Land is solid."

He answered thoughtfully: "As an investment, land is not so precarious
as mines, but there are no big profits to be reaped from it. That's the
difference, my girl."

He must have known that even for investors, western land was going to be
a big thing. He must have known that the railroad companies were buying
it up--that the Milwaukee had gone into a spree of land buying in Lyman
County.

I poured him some water from the can we kept in a hole in the ground
back of the shack for coolness. He took a swallow and set it down. "Good
Lord, how can anyone drink that!" he exclaimed.

"We get used to it," I told him. "And we'll have a better water supply
in time. It will rain--it's bound to rain, sooner or later."

He looked out at the blazing sky, the baked earth, a snake slithering
from the path back into the dry grass which rustled as it moved. "So
this is the land y