Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/161

 Blewitt was making a row again over the restraint of his song. The hour for pick-handles was drawing near.

Satisfied that his social duties had been discharged, and quite easy on the point of his professional ones, Dr. Hall returned to his office, partly closed his front door to screen the light of his own lanterns as well as those illuminating the platform, and streched himself out in his surgical chair for a little relaxation and ease.

He tried to picture what that place and country sorrounding would be like a few years hence, after the railroaders had done their work of establishing the permanent track, tamping it as firmly as the Appian Way for the traffic between the seas to pass over in expedition and comfort; after those pioneers who flocked around the landoffice in flopping hats and patched overalls, gaunt, eager, zealous as crusaders in this fight for freedom and home—what it would be like after they had broken the sod and mellowed the soil until it would receive in kindness and nurture in friendliness the seed from their hopeful hands.

It would not marshal, that array of triumphant husbandmen; it would not take shape, that picture of comfort and prosperity in a land so bleak and unpromising. He had looked with amazement on the poor homes men were building on their sections and quarter-sections between Damascus and Simrall. Few had taken advantage of the one building material the land offered in abundance—the sod beneath their feet. This was due in some measure to their ignorance of the method of construction, but more to their prejudice against that kind of houses, which, to these corn-and-hogs farmers, as Cottrell had called them, were a designation of shiftlessness.