miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in
Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set
snugly in a verdant valley. We would come into it by starlight--down a
careless gypsying sort of country road; and there would be the sound of
a dear little trickling bickering cool stream out in the shadows of the
trees fringing the approach to Goodale. And we'd pass pretty little
cottages with vines growing over the doors, and hollyhocks peeping over
the fences, and cheerful lights in the windows.

Goodale! And then, right in the middle of the town (no, _village_--the
word is cosier somehow)--right in the middle of the village there would
be a big restaurant, with such alluring scents of beefsteak all about
it.

I set the pace up that trail. It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse
sort of pace--the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints
the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with
something like a religious awe. How far was Goodale, would you suppose?
Not far, certainly, once we found the railroad.

We made the last steep climb breathlessly, and came out on the level. A
great, monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before us--utterly featureless
in the twilight. Far off across the scabby land a thin black line swept
out of the dusk into the dusk--straight as a crow's flight. It was the
railroad. We made a cross-cut for it, tumbling over gopher holes,
plunging through sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told the
incredible tale of torrents having been there once. I ate quantities of
alkali dust and went on believing in Goodale and beefsteak. Beefsteak
became one of the principal stations on the Great Northern Railroad, so
far as I was concerned personally. That is what you might call the