ined that paper.
Spread a little more ink."

"And I says, 'You shore, Miss, you don't want the pony throwed in?'"
pushing the roller lazily back and forth over the inking table then
across the form on the press. "She ups and takes a snapshot," he rambled
on.

To my delight the postcards were selling like hot cakes at ten cents a
piece. The Ammons's finances were looking up. In many homes today,
throughout the country, there must exist yellowed copies of the card,
the only tangible reminder of an unsuccessful gamble in the government
lottery.

At midnight one night an old spring wagon rattled up to the shack and we
heard the voice of a man--one of the locators who had been hauling
seekers. He held out a handful of small change. "Here," he said proudly;
"I sold every card. And here"--he pulled out a note and a small package.
The note read:

"Your poem is very clever, but your drawing is damn poor. If I'm a Lucky
Number I'll see you in the spring. In the meantime, for heaven's sake,
don't try any more art. Stick to poetry." It was signed "Alexander Van
Leshout," and was accompanied by a ready-to-print cut.

This newspaper cartoonist from Milwaukee was only one of many people
from strange walks of life who entered that lottery. There were others
whose background was equally alien to life in a homestead cabin, who
came to see the West while it was still unchanged, drawn for reasons of
personal adventure, or because the romantic legends of the West
attracted them. People drawn by the intangibles, the freedom of great
space, the touch of the wind on their faces, a return to the simple
elements of living.

Standing in the dreary lines in the Land Office where some of them
waited for as long as two days and nights at a time, we saw farmers,
business men, self-assured boys, white-haired men and women.

A gray-haired woman in her late sixties, holding tightly to an old
white-whiskered man, kept saying encouragingly: "Just hold on a little
longer, Pa." And whenever we passed we heard her asking of those about
her: "Where you from? We're from Blue Springs." The Land Office recorded
the man as David Wagor.

It was not necessary to be a naturalized citizen in order to register,
but it was necessary to have filed intention to become a citizen. One
must be either single or the head of a family; wives, therefore, could
not register. For that reason we were interested in a frail young woman,
a mere girl, sagging under the weigh