mind: What conquering power can ever bring the
warmth of glad welcome to the still, hostile, impenetrable beauty of
these boundless plains?

"The air is full of spirits out here," I said to myself. "There is no
living thing in sight, and yet the land seems inhabited, just as that
old haunted cabin down on the Neosho seemed last June."

And then with the thought of that June day Memory began to play her
tricks on me and I cried out, "Oh, perdition take that stone cabin and
the whole Neosho Valley if that will make me forget it all!"

I strode forward along the silent, sunshiny way, with a thousand things
on my mind's surface and only one thought in its inner deeps. The sun
swung up the sky, and the thin August air even in its heat was light and
invigorating. The river banks were low and soft where the stream cuts
through the alluvial soil a channel many feet below the level of the
Plains. The day was long, but full of interest to me, who took its sight
as a child takes a new picture-book, albeit a certain sense of peril
lurked in the shadowing corners of my thought.

The August sun was low in the west when I climbed up the grassy slope to
Morton's little square stone cabin. It stood on a bold height
overlooking the Saline River. Far away in every direction the land
billows lay fold on fold. Treeless and wide they stretched out to the
horizon, with here and there a low elevation, and here and there the
faint black markings of scrubby bushes clinging to the bank of a stream.
The stream itself, now only a shallow spread of water, bore witness to
the fierce thirst of the summer sun. Up and down the Saline Valley only
a few scattered homesteads were to be seen, and a few fields of slender,
stunted corn told the story of the first struggle for conquest in a
beautiful but lonely and unfriendly land.

Morton was standing at the door of his cabin looking out on that sweep
of plains with thoughtful eyes. He did not see me until I was fairly up
the hill, and when he did he made no motion towards me, but stood and
waited for my coming. In those few moments as I swung forward
leisurely--for I was very tired now--I think we read each other's
character and formed our estimates more accurately than many men have
done after years of close business association.

He was a small man beside me, as I have said, and his quiet manner, and
retiring disposition, half dignity, half modesty, gave the casual
acquaintance no true estimate of h