t in
western Nebraska. Learning of the Wagors' misfortune, he came, started
another store at Ammons for his mother, and helped her to run it for a
while.

All around Ammons the fields lay freshly turned, fallowing for next
year's crop. Our field of flax had been cut for what little it would
make, and the ground plowed over to soak up the winter's moisture. With
the turning of the ground for another season, a page in my own life was
turning. "What am I going to do, now that I've come in under the wire?"
I wondered.

And then I proved up and got my patent. I borrowed a thousand dollars on
it to pay off the government and the balance due our financial backers,
who had gambled on us without security. But I did not borrow the money
through the Halbert Donovan Company. The loan had been promised me by
the banks many months before. We had borrowed on the first homestead to
get the second, borrowed to the limit on the second to pay for the
privilege of helping to run the reservation. We now had both farms
mortgaged to the hilt. But the hay alone would pay the interest and
taxes. Land would increase in value.

I was alone at the shack now with the newspaper still to get out. Riding
across the plains toward the claim one afternoon, I heard the swift,
staccato clicking of type as it fell rapidly in the stick. The metallic
sound carried across the prairie as I neared the shop. As I walked in I
saw, perched on the high stool in front of the type case, a little
hoydenish figure with flying hair--Myrtle Coombs, the hammer-and-tongs
printer. "This don't look right to me," she remarked, reading her stick
as I came in, "but a good printer follows copy even if it flies out of
the window."

Myrtle had come back on vacation to see how her homestead was
progressing. Seeing that I needed help, she unrolled a newspaper bundle
and hung her "extra" dress and nightgown on a nail, laid a comb and a
toothbrush on the dry-goods-box dressing table, and for two weeks she
"threw" out the paper with a bang.

About this time the regime of our government was changing. Out of the
West, from which we had had only sheep and cattle, there were coming men
destined to be leaders in the affairs of the country. As men had risen
from the ranks to guide the destinies of the Colonies, so men appeared
from the West to shape this new America.

They came from a world where land was king. It was a boundless
territory. A large section of it, which was once marked