Winning the Wilderness. McCarter Margaret Hill

hand out toward the sweep of brown prairie with the dry river bed and the brazen sands beyond it. Lean cattle stood disconsolately in the shadeless open, while the cultivated fields were a mass of yellow clods about the starveling crops.

      Asher did not heed the interruption.

      “You declare that I’ll leave here as soon as I can get away, and that I’m brutal to use my influence to keep the settlers here; that I am working a trick you have worked out already for me, to get the land myself because it is valuable; you, in your humane love for your fellowmen, you threaten me with all unknown calamities if I refuse your demand. And then you ask me what I have to say, what I am going to do, and, with fine gestures, what I see?”

      “Well?” Champers queried urgently.

      The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did not hasten his words for all the bluster.