Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/23

Rh They could n't help but learn to see far, on such prairies. And, like little Dan by the pool, they did all their hunting and their fishing and exercised many of the instincts that a thousand generations of wild men had instilled in them, in their dreams alone. It was great exercise for the imagination. And perhaps that has had something to do with the size of the crop of writers and poets and artists that is now being harvested in the Middle West.

Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture of little Dan, the pool back of the courthouse has very little importance in his story. It did, however, afford an illustration to him of one of the really astonishing truths of life. He saw a shadow in the water that he pretended he thought might be a fish. He threw a stone at it.

The only thing that happened was a splash, and then a slowly widening ripple. The circumference of the ripple grew ever larger, extended and widened, and finally died at the edge of the shore. It set little Dan to thinking. He wondered if, had the pool been larger, the ripple still would have spread; and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple would have gone on forever. At the time he did not know the laws of cause and effect. Later, when Gitcheapolis was great and