The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas

  PROEM

  "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her"

  I can hear it always--the Call of the Prairie. The passing of sixtyWinters has left me a vigorous man, although my hair is as white as theJanuary snowdrift in the draws, and the strenuous events of some of theyears have put a tax on my strength. I shall always limp a little in myright foot--that was left out on the plains one freezing night withnothing under it but the earth, and nothing over it but the sky. Still,considering that although the sixty years were spent mainly in thatpioneer time when every day in Kansas was its busy day, I am not evenbeginning to feel old. Neither am I sentimental and inclined to poetry.Life has given me mostly her prose selections for my study.

  But this love of the Prairie is a part of my being. All the comedy andtragedy of these sixty years have had them for a setting, and I can nomore put them out of my life than the Scotchman can forget the heather,or the Swiss emigrant in the flat green lowland can forget the icypasses of the glacier-polished Alps. Geography is an element of everyman's life. The prairies are in the red corpuscles of my blood. Up anddown their rippling billows my memory runs. For always I seethem,--green and blossom-starred in the Springtime; or drenched with thedriving summer deluge that made each draw a brimming torrent; or golden,purple, and silver-rimmed in the glorious Autumn. I have seen them grayin the twilight, still and tenderly verdant at noonday, and cold andfrost-wreathed under the white star-beams. I have seen them yield uptheir rich yellow sheaves of grain, and I have looked upon their drearywastes marked with the dull black of cold human blood. Plain practicalman of affairs that I am, I come back to the blessed prairies for myinspiration as the tartan warmed up the heart of Argyle.

  THE PRICE OF THE PRAIRIE