and saw the prairie dogs making the dust fly as they digged about
what had been intended for a flower bed on the campus. Then he packed
up his meager library and other college equipments and walked ten
miles across the plains to hire a man with a team to haul them away.
The teamster had much ado to drive his half-bridle-wise Indian
ponies near enough to the university doorway to load his wagon.
Before the threshold a huge rattlesnake lay coiled, already disputing
any human claim to this kingdom of the wild.

Discouraging as all this must have been to Fenneben, when he started
away from the deserted town he smiled joyously as a man who sees
his road fair before him.

"I might go back to Cambridge and poke about after the dead
languages until my brother passes on, and then drop into his chair
in the university," he said to himself, "but the trustee was right.
I can never build the East into the West. But I can learn from
the East how to bring the West into its own kingdom. I can make
the dead languages serve me the better to speak the living words here.
And if I can do that, I may earn a Master's Degree from my
Alma Mater without the writing of a learned thesis to clinch it.
But whether I win honor or I am forgotten, this shall be my life-work--
out on these Kansas prairies, to till a soil that shall grow
MEN AND WOMEN."

For the next three years Dean Fenneben and his college
flourished on the borders of a little frontier town,
if that can be called flourishing which uses up time, and money,
and energy, Christian patience, and dogged persistence.
Then an August prairie fire, sweeping up from the southwest,