O Pioneers!

ut their poultry. She spent a whole day with one young farmer who had been away at school, and who was experimenting with a new kind of clover hay. She learned a

is rough and hilly. They can always scrape along down there, but they can never do anything big. Down there they have a little certainty, but up with us there

e, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her

t evening she held a family council and told

bout farming. The land sells for three times as much as this, but in five years we will double it. The rich men down there own all the best land, and they are buying all they can get. The thing to do is to sell our catt

he clock furiously. "I won't slave to pay off another mortgage. I'll never

forehead. "How do you propos

f fourteen hundred acres, won't it? You won't have to pay off your mortgages for six years. By that time, any of this land will be worth thirty dollars an acre - it will be worth fifty, but we'll say thirty; then you can sell a garden patch anywhere, and pay off a debt of sixteen hundred dollars. It's not

o you KNOW that land is going to go

ain that, Lou. You'll have to take my word for it. I KNOW, that's

rk so much land," he said dully, as if he were talking to himself. "We can't even try. It would jus

ing up other people's land don't try to farm it. They are the men to watch, in a new country. Let's try to do like the shrewd ones, and not

"Everybody will say we are crazy. It must

he right thing is usually just what everybody don't do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because father had more brains. Our people we

's secretary all evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra's project, but she felt sure now that they would consent to it. Just before bedtime Oscar went out for a pail of water. W

She waited a moment, but he did not stir. "I won't say any mor

paper," he said slowly. "All the time I w

I don't want you to,

re in so deep now, we might as well go deeper. But it's hard work pulling out of debt. Like pulling a threshi

r. That's why I want to try an easier way. I d

signing papers is signing papers. There ain't no maybe about

she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much t