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 exception, has knocked the country hard. It's too far west of Dodge, they say, for anybody, or anything, to prosper. But you've been here a long time; it hasn't broken you."

"It would have, if I'd been foolish enough to try to farm it, at least the way these corn-country men are trying to do it. I'll have to revise my general statement that it isn't a farming country. I mean it's not a farming country in the corn and hogs sense. If the right crop can be found to stand the drouths and hot winds, the land's as good as any that lays out of doors. But I don't know whether the Almighty ever made anything but buffalo grass for this country. If he did, I've never seen it."

"That very thing was brought to my notice yesterday by a man who is confident he has solved it, Major."

"What's he got? who is he?"

"A young fellow by the name of Holbrook, from southeastern Kansas. He's planning to put in forty acres of a stuff called kafir corn."

"I never heard of it."

"It's new to me, too, but I'm not a farmer. Holbrook bought a section of railroad land that somebody got on by mistake and worked for two years before they ousted him—"

"Milt Welch's place, I guess. The county surveyor was to blame. Welch thought he was on school land, broke in forty or fifty acres of sod. His work all went for nothing. So he's got that section, heh? Good location. How did you come to run into him?"

"His little boy, two years old, had a bad throat. They thought it was diphtheria. You know that old fellow