illness. But thirty-one years of age, he had won a place in literature
so gratifying that one might well rest content with a recital of his
accomplishments. But his youth suggests a tale that is only partly
told and the conjecture naturally arises,--"What success might he not
have won?" Five novels, "Ben Blair," "Where the Trail Divides," "The
Dissolving Circle," "The Quest Eternal," and "The Dominant Dollar,"
besides magazine articles, and a number of short stories (many of them
appearing in this volume) were all written in the space of eight
years' time, and, as he said, were entirely produced after nightfall.

While interested naturally in the many phases of his life,--as a
professional man, as an author, as the chief factor in the domestic
drama,--yet most of all it pleases me to remember him as he appeared
when under the spell of the prairies he loved so well. Tramping the
fields in search of prairie-chicken or quail, a patient watcher in the
rushes of a duck-pond, or merely lying flat on his back in the
sunshine,--he was a being transformed. For he had in him much of the
primitive man and his whole nature responded to the "call of the
wild." But you who know his prairie-tales must have read between the
lines,--for who, unless he loved the "honk" of the wild geese, could
write, "to those who have heard it year by year it is the sweetest,
most insistent of music. It is the spirit of the wild, of magnificent
distances, of freedom impersonate"?

To the late Mrs. Wilbur Teeters I am indebted for the following
tribute, which appeared in the "Iowa Alumnus."

"Dr. Lillibridge's field of romance was his own. Others have told of
the Western mountains and pictured the great desert of the Southwest,
but none has painted with so masterful a hand the great prairies of
the Northwest, shown the lavish hand with which Nature pours out her
gifts upon the pioneer, and again the calm cruelty with which she
effaces him. In the midst of these scenes his actors played their
parts and there he played his own part, clean in life and thought, a
man to the last, slipping away upon the wings of the great storm which
had just swept over his much-loved land, wrapped in the snowy mantle
of his own prairies."

Edith Keller-Lillibridge

CONTENTS

I A BREATH OF PRAIRIE 13
II THE DOMINANT IMPULSE 61