The Mystery of Metropolisville | Page 3

with an inquisitive and surprised
rising inflection.
"Hey?" said Jim, looking at him solemnly. "Tew times tew use to be
four when I larnt the rewl of three in old Varmount. Mebbe 'taint so in
the country you come from, where they call a pail a bucket."
The passenger kept still awhile. The manner of the Superior Being
chilled him a little. But Whisky Jim graciously broke the silence
himself.
"Sell nex' week fer six."
The young man's mind had already left the subject under discussion,
and it took some little effort of recollection to bring it back.
"How long will it keep on going up?" he asked.
"Tell it teches the top. Come daown then like a spile-driver in a hurry.
Higher it goes, the wuss it'll mash anybody what happens to stan'
percisely under it."
"When will it reach the top?"
The Superior Being turned his eyes full upon the student, who blushed
a little under the half-sneer of his look.
"Yaou tell! Thunder, stranger, that's jest what everybody'd pay money

tew find out. Everybody means to git aout in time, but--thunder!--every
piece of perrary in this territory's a deadfall. Somebody'll git catched in
every one of them air traps. Gee up! G'lang! Git up, won't you? Hey?"
And this last sentence was ornamented with another magnificent
writing-master flourish of the whip-lash, and emphasized by an
explosive crack at the end, which started the four horses off in a
swinging gallop, from which Jim did not allow them to settle back into
a walk until they had reached the high prairie land in the rear of the
town.
"What are those people living in tents for?" asked the student as he
pointed back to Red Owl, now considerably below them, and which
presented a panorama of balloon-frame houses, mostly innocent of
paint, with a sprinkling of tents pitched here and there among the trees;
on lots not yet redeemed from virgin wildness, but which possessed the
remarkable quality of "fetching" prices that would have done honor to
well-located land in Philadelphia.
"What they live that a-way fer? Hey? Mos'ly 'cause they can't live no
other." Then, after a long pause, the Superior Being resumed in a tone
of half-soliloquy: "A'n't a bed nur a board in the hull city of Red Owl to
be had for payin' nur coaxin'. Beds is aces. Houses is trumps. Landlords
is got high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands. Looky there! A
bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory." And he pointed to the old
steamboat "Ben Bolt," which was just coming up to the landing with
deck and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.
But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer. It marks
an epoch in a man's life when he first catches sight of a prairie
landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling
ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed
Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed
the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his
natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature
superadded.
"What a magnificent country!" he cried.

"Talkin' sense!" muttered Jim. "Never seed so good a place fer stagin'
in my day."
For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants whose
white-top "prairie schooners" wound slowly along the road, these
grass-grown hills and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so
many places where good farms could be opened without the trouble of
cutting off the trees. It was not landscape, but simply land where one
might raise thirty or forty bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without
any danger of "fevernager;" to the keen-witted speculator looking
sharply after corner stakes, at a little distance from the road, it was just
so many quarter sections, "eighties," and "forties," to be bought low
and sold high whenever opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good
country for staging, except a few "blamed sloughs where the bottom
had fell out." But the enthusiastic eyes of young Albert Charlton
despised all sordid and "culinary uses" of the earth; to him this limitless
vista of waving wild grass, these green meadows and treeless hills
dotted everywhere with purple and yellow flowers, was a sight of
Nature in her noblest mood. Such rolling hills behind hills! If those
rolls could be called hills! After an hour the coach had gradually
ascended to the summit of the "divide" between Purple River on the
one side and Big Gun River on the other, and the rows of willows and
cotton-woods that hung over the water's edge--the only trees under the
whole sky--marked distinctly the meandering lines of the two streams.