Miss Hallman laughed and made a very pretty gesture with her
two ringed hands. "Whatever sounds the best to them," she
said. "If they write and ask about spuds we come back with
illustrated folders of potato crops and statistics of average
yields and prices and all that. If it's dairy, we have dairy
folders. And so on. It isn't any fraud--there ARE sections of
the country that produce almost anything, from alfalfa to
strawberries. You know that," she challenged.

"Sure. But I didn't know there was much tillable land left
lying around loose," he ventured to say.

Again Miss Hallman made the pretty gesture, which might mean
much or nothing. "There's plenty of land 'lying around
loose,' as you call it. How do you know it won't produce,
till it has been tried?"

"That's right," Andy assented uneasily. "If there's water to
put on it--"

"And since there is the land, our business lies in getting
people located on it. The towns and the railroads are back of
us. That is, they look with favor upon bringing settlers into
the country. It increases the business of the country--the
traffic, the freights, the merchants' business, everything."

Andy puckered his eyebrows and looked out of the window upon
a great stretch of open, rolling prairie, clothed sparely in
grass that was showing faint green in the hollows, and with
no water for miles--as he knew well--except for the rivers