Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/66



Romance is not here: it is over the river, it lies beyond the hills. No person is conscious of living it in his own life; its iridescence always sparkles on some distant shore. The world across youth's eyes are lifted in the straining, heart-drawing hunger to be away on the always-beginning, never-ending, roaming quest for romance. For romance is not here: it is far away along world-old trails which the feet of men have worn in their search after it, a treasure that no man is conscious of when he holds it in his hand.

Eudora Ellison, for example, could not understand why people came to that part of Kansas seeking the romance of adventure, the romance of fortune—which amounts to the same thing, fortune being the ultimate in any case—when she knew neither was to be encountered there. If they found adventure, it was the cutting and shooting kind, the sordid, brawling kind, to be encountered at Drumwell; or fortune, it could be only the commonplace, colorless kind that rose from cattle. A man must follow such a barbaric life in the open, facing all winds and weather, to come to prosperity in the livestock business that he had all the faculty of enjoying it blown out, and frozen out, and washed out of him by the rain, long before it came.

No, that was not the place for romance, give it the best