erly
love so named--all these things were to come later, as they have ever
done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the
foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.
Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of
such a beginning of our prosperity. Having become slaves, we scoff at
the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was
a master. Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the
sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each
man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own. There
were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were
happy. Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet
for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own
this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to
untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW MOVERS

Far away, across the wide gray plain, appeared a tiny dot, apparently
an unimportant fixture of the landscape. An hour earlier it might not
have been observed at all by even the keenest eye, and it would have
needed yet more time to assure an observer even now that the dot was a
moving object. Under the shifting play of the prairie sun the little
object appeared now dark, now light in colour, but became gradually
more distinct. It came always crawling steadily on. Presently an
occasional side-blown puff of dust added a certain heraldry, and thus
finally the white-topped wagon and its plodding team came fully into
view, crawling ever persistently from the East into the West.

Meantime, from the direction of the north, there came travelling across
the prairie another cloud of dust more rapid than that stirred up by
the slow-moving emigrant wagon. Sam, the stage driver, was crossing on
his regular buckboard trip from Ellisville to Plum Centre, and was now
nearly half-way on his journey. Obviously the courses of these two
vehicles must intersect, and at the natural point of this intersection
the driver of the faster pulled up and waited for the other. "Movers"
were not yet so common in that region that the stage driver, natural
news agent, must not pause for investigation.

The driver of the wagon, a tall, dark man, drew rein with a grave
salutation, his tired horses standing with drooping heads while there
took place one