reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things
on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the
corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the
sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in
the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that
have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing
and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and
excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has
passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the
habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the
Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in
other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always
taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his
first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He
exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its
effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible
amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even
to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
or hack away at his window