west lines will run themselves when you locate the north
corners--but I'll have to wait till the ground freezes, or get Darius
Green to help me--and the great tide of immigration hain't brought him
to this neck of the woods yet."

"But where's my land?" I queried: for I did not understand all this
hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies in 1855.
"Where's my land?"

"The heft of it," said he, "is right down there in Hell Slew. It's all
pretty wet; but I think you've got the wettest part of it; the best duck
ponds, and the biggest muskrat-houses. This slew is the only blot in the
'scutcheon of this pearl of counties, Mr. Vandemark--the only blot; and
you've got the blackest of it."

I leaned back against the buggy, completely unnerved. Magnus put out his
hand as if to grasp mine, but I did not take it. There went through my
head that rhyme of Jackway's that he hiccoughed out as he drank with his
cronies--on my money--that day last winter back in Madison: "Sold again,
and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" This huge marsh was
what John Rucker, after killing my mother, had deeded me for my
inheritance!

In that last word I had from her, the poor stained letter she left in
the apple-tree--perhaps it was her tears, and not the rain that had
stained it so--she had said: "I am going very far away, and if you ever
see this, keep it always, and whenever you see it remember that I would
always have died willingly for you, and that I am going to build up for
you a fortune which will give you a better life than I have lived." And
this was the fortune which she had built up for me! I hated myself for
having been gulled--it seemed as if I had allowed my mother to be
cheated more than myself. Good land, I thought, was selling in Monterey
County for two dollars an acre. The next summer when I bought an eighty
across the road so as to have more plow-land, I paid three dollars and a
half an acre, and sorrowed over it afterward: for in 1857 I could have
got all I wanted of the best land--if I had had the money, which I had
not--at a dollar and a quarter. At the going price then, in 1855, this
section of land, if it had been good land, would have been worth only
twelve or thirteen hundred dollars. At that rate, what was this swamp
worth? Nothing!

I can still feel sorry for that poor boy, myself, green as grass, and
without a friend in the world to whom he could go for advice, halted in
his one-sided ba