would carry off a white captive, miles away to the westward.
Plumped down in a big frame barracks in the public square of
twenty acres in the middle of this new town, at once real estate
dealers advertised the place as the literary center of Kansas;
while lots in straggling additions far away across the prairie
draws were boomed as "college flats within walking distance
of the university."

In this new setting Lloyd Fenneben started again to build up
what had been so recklessly torn down. But it was slow doing,
and in a downcast hour the head of the board of trustees took
council with the young dean.

"Funnybone, that's what the boys call you, ain't it?"
The name had come along over the prairie with the school.
"Funnybone, you are as likely a man as ever escaped
from Boston. But you're never going to build the East into the West,
no more'n you could ram the West into the Atlantic seaboard states.
My advice to you is to get yourself into the West for good
and drop your higher learnin' notions, and be one of us,
or beat it back to where you came from quick."

Dean Fenneben listened as a man who hears the reading of his own obituary.

"You've come out to Kansas with beautiful dreams," the bluff
trustee continued. "Drop 'em! You're too late for the New England
pioneers who come West. They've had their day and passed on.
The thing for you to do is to commercialize yourself right away.
Go to buyin' and sellin' dirt. It's all a man can do for Kansas now.
Just boom her real estate."