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“Yes, I know,” acquiesced Ichabod.

The agent took a chair behind the battered pine desk, and pointed to another opposite.

“Any way I can help you?” he suggested.

“Yes,” answered Maurice. “I’m thinking of taking a homestead.”

The agent looked his visitor up and down and back again; then, being native born, his surprise broke forth in idiom.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” he avowed.

It was Ichabod’s turn to make observation.

“I believe you; you look it,” he corroborated at length.

Again the little man stared; and in the silence following, a hungry-looking bird-dog thrust his thin muzzle in at the door, and sniffed.

“Get out,” shouted the owner at the intruder, adding in extenuation: “I’m busy.” He certainly was “jiggered.”

Ichabod came to the rescue.

“I called to learn how one goes at it to take a claim,” he explained. “The modus operandi isn’t exactly clear in my mind.”

The agent braced up in his chair.

“I suppose you’ll say it’s none of my business,” he commented, “but as a speculation you’d do a lot better to buy up the claims of poor cusses who have to relinquish, than to settle yourself.”

“I’m not speculating. I expect to build a house, and live here.”

“As a friend, then, let me tell you you’ll never stand it.” A stubby thumb made motion up the narrow street. “You see this town. I won’t say what it is–you realize for yourself; but bad as it is, it’s advanced civilization alongside of the country. You’ll have to go ten miles out to get any land that’s not taken.” He stopped and lit his pipe. “Do you know what it means to live alone ten miles out on the prairie?”

“I’ve never lived in the country.”

“I’ll tell you, then, what it means.” He put down his pipe and looked out at the open door. His face changed; became softer, milder, younger. His voice, when he spoke, added to the impression of reminiscence, bearing an almost forgotten tone of years ago.

“The prairie!” he apostrophized. “It means the loneliest place on God’s earth. It means that living there, in life you bury yourself, your hopes, your ambitions. It means you work ever to forget the past–and fail. It means self, always; morning, noon, night; until the very solitude becomes an incubus. It means that in time you die, or, from being a man, become as the cattle.” The speaker turned for the first time to the tall man before him, his big blue eyes wide open and round, his voice an entreaty.

“Don’t move into it, man. It’s death and worse than death to such as you! You’re too old to begin. One must be born to the life; must never have known another. Don’t do it, I say.”

Ichabod Maurice, listening, read in that appeal, beneath the words, the wild, unsatisfied tale of a disappointed human life.

“You are dissatisfied, lonesome–There was a time years ago perhaps–“

“I don’t know.” The glow had passed and the face was old again, and heavy. “I remember nothing. I’m dead, dead.” He drew a rough map from his pocket and spread it out before him.

“If you’ll move close, please, I’ll show you the open lands.”

For an hour he explained homesteads, preemptions and tree claims, and the method of filing and proving up. At parting, Ichabod held out his hand.

“I thank you for your advice,” he said.

The man behind the desk puffed stolidly.

“But don’t intend to follow it,” he completed.

Instinctively, metaphor sprang to the lips of Ichabod Maurice.

“A small speck of circumstance, which is near, obliterates much that is in the distance.” He turned toward the door. “I shall not be alone.”

The little agent smoked on in silence for some minutes, gazing motionless at the doorway through which Ichabod had passed out. Again the lean bird-dog thrust in an apologetic head, dutifully awaiting recognition. At length the man shook his pipe clean, and leaned back in soliloquy.

“Man, woman, human nature; habit, solitude, the prairie.” He spoke each word slowly, and with a shake of his head. “He’s mad, mad; but I pity him”–a pause–“for I know.”