that is to say, of sods and earthen unbaked bricks--and since
under his master's direction he was not less serviceable than docile,
it was not long before the "claim" of Battersleigh was adorned with a
comfortable house fit for either winter or summer habitation. Franklin
meantime selected the body of land upon which he proposed to make
settlers' entry, this happily not far from his friend, and soon this
too had its house--small, crude, brown, meagre, but not uncomforting to
one who looked over the wide land and saw none better than his own.
Then, little by little, they got precious coal from the railroad, this
land having but scant fuel near at hand, and they built great stacks of
the _bois des vaches_, that fuel which Nature left upon the plains
until the railroads brought in coal and wood. Each man must, under the
law, live upon his own land, but in practice this was no hardship.
Each must of necessity cook for himself, sew for himself, rely upon
himself for all those little comforts which some men miss so keenly,
and which others so quickly learn to supply. To these two this was but
comfortable campaigning.

There remained ever before the minds of the settlers the desirability
of laying this land under tribute, of forcing it to yield a livelihood.
Franklin had no wish to depart from his original plans. He looked to
see all the ways of the civilization he had left behind come duly
hither to search him out. He was not satisfied to abandon his law
books for the saddle, but as yet there was no possibility of any
practice in the law, though meantime one must live, however simply. It
was all made easy. That wild Nature, which had erected rude barriers
against the coming of the white man, had at her reluctant recession
left behind the means by which the white man might prevail. Even in
the "first year" the settler of the new West was able to make his
living. He killed off the buffalo swiftly, but he killed them in
numbers so desperately large that their bones lay in uncounted tons all
over a desolated empire. First the hides and then the bones of the
buffalo gave the settler his hold upon the land, which perhaps he could
not else have won.

Franklin saw many wagons coming and unloading their cargoes of bleached
bones at the side of the railroad tracks. The heap of bones grew vast,
white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot
long. There was a market for all this back in that country whi