the harvest-fields is ripe, to know what can be did when men is
free, not hampered by set-and-bound rules as holds 'em down to the
ways of their fathers. Back East, folks is straining themselves to
make over, and improve, and polish up what they found ready-to-hand--
but here out West, we creates. It takes a big vision to see the
bigness of the West, and you can't get no true idee by squinting at
the subject."

Lahoma did not reply, and Bill feared that under the conviction of
her friend's eloquence, she had begun to idealize the efforts of
Wilfred Compton. He need not have been afraid. To her imagination,
"big people" were not living in dugouts, or tents, far from
civilization; "big people" were going to the opera every night, and
riding in splendid carriages along imposing boulevards every day.
Brick and Bill had contrived to live as well as they desired from
profits on skins obtained in the mountains and the small tract of
ground they had cultivated in a desultory manner had done little
beyond supplying themselves with vegetables and the horses with some
extra feed. She had no great opinion of agriculture; and though she
had taken part in planting and hoeing with a pleasurable zest, she
had never entertained herself with the thought that she was engaged
in a great work. As to dugouts, they had no place in her dreams of
the future. Since Wilfred had chosen to handicap himself with the
same limitations that bound her, even the thought of him was to be
banished from her world, banished absolutely.

Her day-dreams did not cease, but became more dreamy, more unreal,
since the hero of her fancies, for whom she now had no
flesh-and-blood prototype, was suggested only by her moods and her
books. As the sun-clear days of maidenhood melted imperceptibly