the outskirts of Lagonda Ledge. As a fulfillment of prophecy,
it had arisen from the visions and pockets of some Boston scholars,
and it had come to the West and was made flesh--or stone--and dwelt
among men on the outskirts of a booming young Kansas town.

Lloyd Fenneben was just out of Harvard when Dr. Joshua Wream,
his step-brother, many years his senior, professor of all the dead
languages ever left unburied, had put a considerable fortune
into his hands, and into his brain the dream of a life-work--
even the building of a great university in the West. For the Wreams
were a stubborn, self-willed, bookish breed, who held that salvation
of souls could come only through possession of a college diploma.
Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with all his youth and health
and money, with high ideals and culture and ambition for
success and dreams of honor--and, hidden deep down, the memory
of some sort of love affair, but that was his own business.
With this dream of a new Harvard on the western prairies,
he had burned his bridges behind him, and in an unbusiness-like way,
relying too much upon a board of trustees whom he had interested
in his plans he had eagerly begun his task, struggling to adapt
the West to his university model, measuring all men and means
by the scholarly rule of his Alma Mater. Being a young man,
he took himself full seriously, and it was a tremendous blow
to his sense of dignity when the youthful Jayhawkers at the outset
dubbed him "Dean Funnybone"--a name he was never to lose.

His college flourished so amazingly that another boom town,
farther inland, came across the prairie one day, and before
the eyes of the young dean bought it of the money-loving trustees--
body and soul and dean--and packed it off as the Plains Indians