sidewalk continued its uneven course through sunflower
patches, until you reached the solitary, new brick Catholic
Church. The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining
waste lots, in the hope of making them more salable--
"Farrier's Addition," this patch of prairie was called in the
clerk's office. An eighth of a mile beyond the church was
a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the
gully was old Uncle Billy Beemer's grove,--twelve town
lots set out in fine, well-grown cottonwood trees, delightful

to look upon, or to listen to, as they swayed and rippled in
the wind. Uncle Billy had been one of the most worthless
old drunkards who ever sat on a store box and told filthy
stories. One night he played hide-and-seek with a switch
engine and got his sodden brains knocked out. But his
grove, the one creditable thing he had ever done in his life,
rustled on. Beyond this grove the houses of the depot
settlement began, and the naked board walk, that had run
in out of the sunflowers, again became a link between
human dwellings.

One afternoon, late in the summer, Dr. Howard Archie
was fighting his way back to town along this walk through
a blinding sandstorm, a silk handkerchief tied over his
mouth. He had been to see a sick woman down in the depot
settlement, and he was walking because his ponies had