"My boy," said he, "I've actually located your two south corners, and you can run the south line yourself from these stakes. The north line is three hundred and twenty rods north of and parallel to it—and the east and west lines will run themselves when you locate the north corners—but I'll have to wait till the ground freezes, or get Darius Green to help me—and the great tide of immigration hain't brought him to this neck of the woods yet."

"But where's my land?" I queried: for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies in 1855. "Where's my land?"

"The heft of it," said he, "is right down there in Hell Slew. It's all pretty wet; but I think you've got the wettest part of it; the best duck ponds, and the biggest muskrat-houses. This slew is the only blot in the 'scutcheon of this pearl of counties, Mr. Vandemark—the only blot; and you've got the blackest of it."

I leaned back against the buggy, completely unnerved. Magnus put out his hand as if to grasp mine, but I did not take it. There went through my head that rhyme of Jackway's that he hiccoughed out as he drank with his cronies—on my money—that day last winter back in Madison: "Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" This huge marsh was what John Rucker, after killing my mother, had deeded me for my inheritance!

In that last word I had from her, the poor stained letter she left in the apple-tree—perhaps it was her tears, and not the rain that had stained it so—she had said: "I am going very far away, and if you ever see this, keep it always, and whenever you see it remember that I would always have died willingly for you, and that I am going to build up for you a fortune which will give you a better life than I have lived." And this was the fortune which she had built up for me! I hated myself for having been gulled—it seemed as if I had allowed my mother to be cheated more than myself. Good land, I thought, was selling in Monterey County for two dollars an acre. The next summer when I bought an eighty across the road so as to have more plow-land, I paid three dollars and a half an acre, and sorrowed over it afterward: for in 1857 I could have got all I wanted of the best land—if I had had the money, which I had not—at a dollar and a quarter. At the going price then, in 1855, this section of land, if it had been good land, would have been worth only twelve or thirteen hundred dollars. At that rate, what was this swamp worth? Nothing!

I can still feel sorry for that poor boy, myself, green as grass, and without a friend in the world to whom he could go for advice, halted in his one-sided battle with the world, out there on the bare prairie, looking out on what he thought was the scene of his ruin, and thinking that every man's hand had been against him, and would always be. Where were now all my dreams of fat cattle, sleek horses, waddling hogs, and the fine house in which I had had so many visions of spending my life, with a more or less clearly-seen wife—especially during those days after Rowena Fewkes had told me how well she could cook, and proved it by getting me my breakfast; and the later days of my stay in the Grove of Destiny with Virginia Royall. Any open prairie farm, with no house, nothing with which to make a house, and no home but a wagon, and no companions but my cows would have been rather forbidding at first glance; but this—I was certain I was ruined; I suppose I must have looked a little bad, for Henderson L. laid his hand on my shoulder.

"Don't cave in, my boy," said he. "You're young—and there's oceans of good land to be had. Keep a stiff upper lip!"

"I'll kill him!" I shouted. "I'll kill John Rucker!"

"Don't, till you catch him," said Burns. "And what good would it do anyhow?"

"Is there any plow-land on it?" I asked, after getting control of myself.

"Some," said Henderson L. cheerfully. "Don't you remember that we drove up over a spur of the hill back there? Well, all the dry land north of our track is yours. Finest building-spot in the world, Jake. We'll make a farm of this yet. Come back and I'll show you."

4

So we went back and looked over all the dry ground I possessed, and agreed that there were about forty acres of it, and as Burns insisted, sixty in a dry season; and he stuck to it that a lot of that slew was as good pasture especially in a dry time as any one could ask for. This would be fine for a man as fond of cows as I was, though, of course, cows could range at will all over the country. It was fine hay land, he said, too, except in the wettest places; but it was true also, that any one could make hay anywhere.

I paid Henderson L., bade good-by to Magnus Thorkelson, drove my outfit up on the "building-spot," and camped right where my biggest silo now stands. I sat there all the afternoon, not even unhitching my teams, listening as the afternoon drew on toward night, to the bitterns crying "plum pudd'n'" from the marsh, to the queer calls of the water-rail, and to the long-drawn "whe-e-ep—whe-e-e-ew!" of the curlews, as they alighted on the prairie and stretched their wings up over their backs.

I could never be much of a man, I thought, on a forty-acre farm, nor build much of a house. I had come all the way from York State for this! The bubble had grown brighter and brighter as I had made my strange way across the new lands, putting on more and more of the colors of the rainbow, and now, all had ended in this spot of water on the floor of the earth. I compared myself with the Fewkeses, as I remembered how I had told Virginia just how the rooms of the house should be arranged, and allowed her to change the arrangement whenever she desired, and even to put great white columns in front as she said they did in Kentucky. We had agreed as to just what trees should be set out, and what flowers should be planted in the blue-grass lawn.

All this was gone glimmering now—and yet as I sit here, there are the trees, and there are the flowers, very much as planned, in the soft blue-grass lawn; about the only thing lacking being the white columns.

I was lying on the ground, looking out across the marsh, and as my misfortunes all rolled back over my mind I turned on my face and cried like a baby. Finally, I felt a large light hand laid softly on my head. I looked up and saw Magnus Thorkelson bending over me.

"Forty acres," said he, "bane pretty big farm in Norvay. My fadder on twenty acres, raise ten shildren. Not so gude land like dis. Vun of dem shildern bane college professor, and vun a big man in leggislatur. Forty acre bane gude farm, for gude farmer."

I turned over, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and sat up.

"I guess I dropped asleep," I said.

"Yass," he said. "You bane sleep long time. I came back to ask if I stay vith you. I halp you. You halp me. Ve halp each udder. Ve be neighbors alvays. I get farm next you. I halp you build house, an' you halp me. Maybe ve lif togedder till you git vooman, or I git vooman—if American vooman marry Norwegian man. I stay?"

I took his hand and pressed it. After a few days' studying over it, I made up my mind that in the kindness of his heart he had come back just to comfort me. And all that he had said we would do, we did. Before long we had a warm dugout barn built in the eastern slope of the hillside, partly sheltered from the northwestern winds, and Magnus and I slept in one end of it on the sweet hay we cut in the marsh while the cows ranged on the prairie. Together we broke prairie, first on his land, then on mine. Together we hauled lumber from the river for my first little house.

If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good house. I never saw any until the last of Iowa was settling up, out in the northwestern part of the state, in Lyon, Sioux and Clay Counties.

All that summer, every wagon and draught animal in Monterey County was engaged in hauling lumber—some of it such poor stuff as basswood sawed in little sawmills along the rivers; and it was not until in the 'eighties that the popular song, The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim proved two things—that the American pioneer had learned to build with something besides timber, and that the Homestead Law had come into effect. What Magnus and I were doing, all the settlers on the Monterey County farms were doing—raising sod corn and potatoes and buckwheat and turnips, preparing shelter for the winter, and wondering what they would do for fuel. Magnus helped me and I helped him.

A lot is said nowadays about the Americanization of the foreigner; but the only thing that will do the thing is to work with the foreigner, as I worked with Magnus—let him help me, and be active in helping him. The Americanization motto is, "Look upon the foreigner as an equal. Help him. Let him help you. Make each other's problems mutual problems—and then he is no longer a foreigner." When Magnus Thorkelson came back on foot across the prairie from Monterey Centre, to lay his hand on the head of that weeping boy alone on the prairie, and to offer to live with him and help him, his English was good enough for me, and to me he was as fully naturalized as if all the judges in the world had made him lift his hand while he swore to support the Constitution of the United States and of the State of Iowa. He was a good enough American for Jacobus Teunis Vandemark.



CHAPTER XIII

THE PLOW WEDS THE SOD

The next day was a wedding-day—the marriage morning of the plow and the sod. It marked the beginning of the subdual of that wonderful wild prairie of Vandemark Township and the Vandemark farm. No more fruitful espousal ever took place than that—when the polished steel of my new breaking plow was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end.

The plow itself was long, low, and yacht-like in form; a curved blade of polished steel. The plowman walked behind it in a clean new path, sheared as smooth as a concrete pavement, with not a lump of crumbled earth under his feet—a cool, moist, black path of richness. The furrow-slice was a long, almost unbroken ribbon of turf, each one laid smoothly against the former strand, and under it lay crumpled and crushed the layer of grass and flowers. The plow-point was long and tapering, like the prow of a clipper, and ran far out under the beam, and above it was the rolling colter, a circular blade of steel, which cut the edge of the furrow as cleanly as cheese. The lay of the plow, filed sharp at every round, lay flat, and clove the slice neatly from the bosom of earth where it had lain from the beginning of time. As the team steadily pulled the machine along, I heard a curious thrilling sound as the knife went through the roots, a sort of murmuring as of protest at this violation—and once in a while, the whole engine, and the arms of the plowman also, felt a jar, like that of a ship striking a hidden rock, as the share cut through a red-root—a stout root of wood, like red cedar or mahogany, sometimes as large as one's arm, topped with a clump of tough twigs with clusters of pretty whitish blossoms.

As I looked back at the results of my day's work, my spirits rose; for in the East, a man might have worked all summer long to clear as much land as I had prepared for a crop on that first day. This morning it had been wilderness; now it was a field—a field in which Magnus Thorkelson had planted corn, by the simple process of cutting through the sods with an ax, and dropping in each opening thus made three kernels of corn. Surely this was a new world! Surely, this was a world in which a man with the will to do might make something of himself. No waiting for the long processes by which the forests were reclaimed; but a new world with new processes, new neighbors, new ideas, new opportunities, new victories easily gained.

Not so easy, Jacobus! In the first place, we Iowa pioneers so ignorant of our opportunities that we hauled timber a hundred miles with which to build our houses, when that black sod would have made us better ones, were also so foolish as to waste a whole year of the time of that land which panted to produce. To be sure, we grew some sod-corn, and some sod-potatoes, and sowed some turnips and buckwheat on the new breaking; but after my hair was gray, I found out, for the first time as we all did, that a fine crop of flax might have been grown that first year. Dakota taught us that. But the farmer of old was inured to waiting—and so we waited until another spring for the sod to rot, and in the meantime, it grew great crops of tumble-weeds, which in the fall raced over the plain like scurrying scared wolves, piling up in brown mountains against every obstacle, and in every hole. If we had only known these simple things, what would it have saved us! But skill grows slowly. We were the first prairie generation bred of a line of foresters, and were a little like the fools that came to Virginia and Plymouth Colony, who starved in a country filled with food. How many fool things are we doing now, I wonder, to cause posterity to laugh, as foolish as the dying of Sir John Franklin in a land where Stefansson grew fat; many, I guess, as foolish as we did when Magnus Thorkelson and I were Vandemark Township.

The sod grew too mature for breaking after the first of June, and not enough time was left for it to rot during the summer; and my cows left with Mr. Westervelt were on my mind; so I stopped the plow and after Magnus and I had built my house and made a lot of hay in the marsh, I began to think of going back after my live stock. I planned to travel light with one span to Westervelt's, pick up another yoke of cows, go on to Dubuque for a load of freight for Monterey Centre, and come back, bringing the rest of my herd with me on the return. When I went to "the Centre," as we called it, I waited until I saw Grandma Thorndyke go down to the store, and then tapped at their door. I thought they might want me to bring them something. They were living in a little house by the public square, where the great sugar maples stand now. These trees were then little beanpoles with tufts of twigs at the tops.



2

Virginia Royall came to the door, as I sort of suspected she might. At first she started back as if she hardly knew me. Maybe she didn't; for Magnus Thorkelson had got me to shaving, and with all that gosling's down off my face, I suppose I looked older and more man-like than before. So she took a long look at me, and then ran to me and took both my hands in hers and pressed them—pressed them so that I remembered it always.

"Why, Teunis," she cried, "is it you? I thought I was never going to see you again!"

"Yes," I said, "it's me—it's me. I came—" and then I stopped, bogged down.

"You came to see me," she said, "and I think you've waited long enough. Only three friends in the world, you, and Mrs. Thorndyke, and Mr. Thorndyke—and you off there on the prairie all these weeks and never came to see me—or us! Tell me about the farm, and the cows, and the new house—I've heard of it—and your foreigner friend, and all about it. Have you any little calves?"

I was able to report that Spot, the heifer that we had such a time driving, had a little calf that was going to look just like its mother; and then I described to her the section of land—all but a little of it down in Hell Slew; and how I hoped to buy a piece across the line so as to have a real farm. Pretty soon we were talking just as we used to talk back there east of Waterloo.

"I came to see you and Elder Thorndyke and his wife," I said, "because I'm going back to Dubuque to get a load of freight, and I thought I might bring something for you."

"Oh," said she, "take me with you, Teunis, take me with you!"

"Could you go?" I asked, my heart in my mouth.

"No, oh, no!" she said. "There's nobody in Kentucky for me to go to; and I haven't any money to pay my way with anyhow. I am alone in the world, Teunis, except for you and my new father and mother—and I'm afraid they are pretty poor, Teunis, to feed and clothe a big girl like me!"

"How much money would it take?" I asked. "I guess I could raise it for you, Virginia."

"You're a nice boy, Teunis," she said, with tears in her eyes, "and I know how well you like money, too; but there's nobody left there. I'm very lonely—but I'm as well off here as anywhere. I'd just like to go with you, though, for when I'm with you I feel so—so safe."

"Safe?" said I. "Why aren't you safe here? Is any one threatening you? Has Buckner Gowdy been around here? Just tell me if he bothers you, and I'll—I'll—"

"Well," said she, "he came here and claimed me from Mr. Thorndyke. He said I was an infant—what do you think of that?—an infant—in law; and that he is my guardian. And a lawyer named Creede, came and talked about his right, not he said by consanguinity, but affinity, whatever that is—"

"I know Mr. Creede," said I. "He rode with me for two or three days. I don't believe he'll wrong any one."

"Mrs. Thorndyke told them to try their affinity plan if they dared, and she'd show them that they couldn't drag a poor orphan away from her friends against her will. And I hung to her, and I cried, and said I'd kill myself before I'd go with him; and that man"—meaning Gowdy—"tried to talk sweet and affectionate and brotherly to me, and I hid my face in Mrs. Thorndyke's bosom—and Mr. Creede looked as if he were sick of his case, and told that man that he would like further consultation with him before proceeding further—and they went away. But every time I see that man he acts as if he wanted to talk with me, and smiles at me—but I won't look at him. Oh, why can't they all be good like you, Teunis?"

Then she told me that I looked a lot better when I shaved—at which I blushed like everything, and this seemed to tickle her very much. Then she asked if I wasn't surprised when she called me Teunis. She had thought a good deal over it, she said, and she couldn't, couldn't like the name of Jacob, or Jake; but Teunis was a quality name. Didn't I think I'd like it if I changed my way of writing my name to J. Teunis Vandemark?

"I like to have you call me Teunis," I said; "but I wouldn't like to have any one else do it. I like to have you have a name to call me by that nobody else uses."

"That's a very gallant speech," she said, blushing—and I vow, I didn't know what gallant meant, and was a little flustered for fear her blushes were called out by something shady.

"Besides," I said, "I have always heard that nobody but a dandy ever parts his name or his hair in the middle!"

"Rubbish!" said she. "My father's name was A. Fletcher Royall, and he was a big strong man, every inch of him. I reckon, though, that the customs are different in the North. Then you won't take me with you, and go back by way of our grove, and—"

And just then Elder Thorndyke came in, and we wished that Mrs. Thorndyke would come to tell what I should bring from Dubuque. He told me in the meantime, about his plans for building a church, and how he was teaching Virginia, so that she could be a teacher herself when she was old enough.

"We'll be filling this country with schools, soon," he said, "and they'll want nice teachers like Virginia."

"Won't that be fine?" asked Virginia. "I just love children. I play with dolls now—a little. And then I can do something to repay my new father and mother for all they are doing for me. And you must come to church, Teunis."

"Virginia says," said the elder, "that you have a good voice. I wish you'd come and help out with the singing."

"Oh, I can't sing," I demurred; "but I'd like to come. I will come, when I get back."

"Yes, you can sing," said Virginia. "Here's a song he taught me back on the prairie:

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o; Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!

"'The river was up, the channel was deep, the wind was steady and strong, The waves they dashed from shore to shore as we went sailing along—

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o; Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!'"

"I think you learned a good deal—for one day," said Mrs. Thorndyke, coming in. "How do you do, Jacob? I'm glad to see you."

Thus she again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes of pleading was incontrovertible."

The river of immigration was still flowing west over the Ridge Road, quite as strong as earlier in the season, and swollen by the stream of traffic setting to and from the settlements for freight. People I met told me that the railroad was building into Dubuque—or at least to the river at Dunlieth. I met loads of lumber which were going out for Buck Gowdy's big house away out in the middle of his great estate; and other loads for Lithopolis, where Judge Stone was making his struggle to build up a rival to Monterey Centre. I reached Dubuque on the seventeenth of July, and put up at a tavern down near the river, where they had room for my stock; and learned that the next day the first train would arrive at Dunlieth, and there was to be a great celebration.

It was the greatest day Dubuque had ever seen, they told me, with cannon fired from the bluff at sunrise, a long parade, much speech-making, and a lot of wild drunkenness. The boatmen from the river boats started in to lick every railroad man they met, and as far as I could see, did so in ninety per cent. of the cases; but in the midst of a fight in which all my canal experiences were in a fair way to be outdone, a woman came into the crowd leading four little crying children. She asked our attention while she explained that their father had had his hand blown off when the salute was fired in the morning, and asked us if we felt like giving something to him to enable him to keep a roof over these little ones. The fight stopped, and we all threw money on the ground in the ring.

There were bridges connecting the main island with the business part of the city, and lines of hacks and carts running from the main part of the town to deep water. There were from four to six boats a day on the river. Lead was the main item of freight, although the first tricklings of the great flood of Iowa and Illinois wheat were beginning to run the metal a close second. To show what an event it was, I need only say that there were delegates at the celebration from as far east as Cleveland; and folks said that a ferry was to be built to bring the railway trains into Dubuque. And the best of all these dreams was, that they came true; and we were before many years freed of the great burden of coming so far to market.

During the next winter the word came to us that the railroad—another one—had crept as far out into the state as Iowa City, and when the freighting season of 1856 opened up, we swung off to the railhead there. Soon, however, the road was at Manchester, then at Waterloo, then at Cedar Falls, and before many years the Iowa Central came up from the south clear to Mason City, and the days of long-distance freighting were over for most of the state; which is now better provided with railways, I suppose, than any other agricultural region in the world.

I couldn't then foresee any such thing, however. They talk of the far-sighted pioneers; but as far as I was concerned I didn't know B from a bull's foot in this business of the progress of the country. I whoa-hawed and gee-upped my way back to Monterey Centre, thinking how great a disadvantage it would be always to have to wagon it back and forth to the river—with the building of the railway into Dunlieth that year right before my face and eyes.

3

I found Magnus Thorkelson surrounded by a group of people arguing with him about something; and Magnus in a dreadful pucker to know what to do. In one group were Judge Horace Stone, N.V. Creede and Forrest Bushyager, then a middle-aged man, and an active young fellow of twenty-five or so named Dick McGill, afterward for many years the editor of the Monterey Centre Journal. These had a petition asking that the county-seat be located at Lithopolis, Judge Stone's new town, and they wanted Magnus to sign it. I suppose he would have done so, if it had not been for the other delegation, consisting of Henderson L. Burns and Doctor Bliven, who had another petition asking for the establishment of the county-seat permanently "at its present site," Monterey Centre. They took me into the confabulation as soon as I weighed anchor in front of the house; and just as they had begun to pour their arguments into me they were joined by another man, who drove up in a two-seated democrat wagon drawn by a fine team of black horses, and in the back seat I saw a man and woman sitting. I thought the man looked like Elder Thorndyke; but the woman's face was turned away from me, and I did not recognize her at first. She had on a new calico dress that I hadn't seen before. It was Virginia.

The man who got out and joined the group was a red-faced, hard-visaged man of about fifty, dressed in black broadcloth, and wearing a beaver hat. He had a black silk cravat tied about a standing collar, with high points that rolled out in front, and he looked rich and domineering. He was ever afterward a big man in Monterey County, and always went by the name of Governor Wade, because he was a candidate for governor two or three times. He was the owner of a big tract of land over to the southwest, next to the Gowdy farm the largest in the county. He came striding over to us as if whatever he said was the end of the law. With him and Henderson L. and N.V. Creede pitching into a leatherhead like me, no wonder I did not recognize Virginia in her new dress; I was in such a stew that I hardly knew which end my head was on.

Each side seemed to want to impress me with the fact that in signing one or the other of those petitions I had come to the parting of the ways. They did not say much about what was best for the county, but bore down on the fact that the way I lined up on that great question would make all the difference in the world with me. Each tried to make me think that I should always be an outsider and a maverick if I didn't stand with his crowd.

"Why," said N.V., "I feel sure that it won't take you long to make up your mind. This little group of men we have here," pointing to Henderson L. and Governor Wade, "are the County Ring that's trying to get this new county in their clutches—the County Ring!"

This made a little grain of an impression on me; and it was the first time I had ever heard the expression so common in local history "the County Ring." I looked at Governor Wade to see what he would say to it. His face grew redder, and he laughed as if Creede were not worth noticing; but he noticed him for all that.

"Young man," said he, "or young men, I should say, both of you want to be somebody in this new community. Monterey Centre represents already, the brains—"

"Like a dollar sign," said Dick McGill, "it represents it, but it hasn't any."

"—the brains," went on Governor Wade, glaring at him, "the culture, the progress and the wealth—"

"That they hope to steal," put in Dick McGill.

"—the wealth," went on the Governor, who hated to be interrupted, "of this Gem of the Prairies, Monterey County. Don't make the mistake, which you can never correct, of taking sides with this little gang of town-site sharks led by my good friend Judge Stone."

Here was another word which I was to hear pretty often in county politics—Gang. One crowd was called a Ring; the other a Gang, I looked at N.V. to see how wrathy he must be, but he only smiled sarcastically, as I have often seen him do in court; and shaking his head at me waved his hand as if putting Governor Wade quite off the map. Just then my team began acting up—they had not been unhitched and were thirsty and hungry; and I went over to straighten them out, leaving the Ring and the Gang laboring with Magnus, who was sweating freely—and then I went over to speak with the elder.

"How do you do, Teunis?" said Virginia very sweetly. "You'll sign our petition, won't you?"

"We don't want to influence your judgment," said the elder, "but I wanted to say to you that if the county-seat remains at Monterey Centre, it will be a great thing for the religious work which under God I hope to do. It will give me a parish. I should like to urge that upon you."

"Do you want me to sign it?" I asked him, looking at Virginia.

"Yes," said he, "if you have no objection."

"Please do!" said Virginia. "I know you can't have any objection."

I turned on my heel, went back to Governor Wade, and signed the petition for Monterey Centre; and then Magnus Thorkelson did the same. Then we both signed another petition carried by both parties, asking that an election be called by the judge of the county south which had jurisdiction over us, for the election of officers. And just as I had expected one side to begirt crowing over the other, and I had decided that there would be a fight, both crowds jumped into their rigs and went off over the prairie, very good naturedly it seemed to me, after the next settler.

"Jake," said N.V., as they turned their buggy around, "you'll make some woman a damned good husband, some day!" and he took off his hat very politely to Virginia, who blushed as red as the reddest rose then blooming on the prairie.

That was the way counties were organized in Iowa. It is worth remembering because it was the birth of self-government. The people made their counties and their villages and their townships as they made their farms and houses and granaries. Everybody was invited to take part—and it was not until long afterward that I confessed to Magnus that I had never once thought when I signed those petitions that I was not yet a voter; and then he was frightened to realize that he was not either. He had not yet been naturalized. The only man in the county known to me who took no interest in the contest was Buck Gowdy. When Judge Stone asked him why, he said he didn't give a damn. There was too much government for him there already, he said.

We did get the election called, and after we had elected our officers there was no county-seat for them to dwell in; so that county judge off to the south appointed a commission to locate the county-seat, which after driving over the country a good deal and drinking a lot of whisky, according to Dick McGill, made Monterey Centre the county town, which it still remains. The Lithopolis people gained one victory—they elected Judge Horace Stone County Treasurer. Within a month N.V. Creede had opened a law office in Monterey Centre, Dick McGill had begun the publication of the Monterey Centre Journal of fragrant memory, Lithopolis began to advertise its stone quarries, and Grizzly Reed, an old California prospector, who had had his ear torn off by a bear out in the mountains, began prospecting for gold along the creek, and talking mysteriously. The sale of lots in Lithopolis went on faster than ever.



CHAPTER XIV

I BECOME A BANDIT AND A TERROR

When General Weaver was running for governor, a Populist worker called on my friend Wilbur Wheelock, who was then as now a stock buyer at our little town of Ploverdale, and asked him if he were a Populist.

"No," said Wilbur, "but I have all the qualifications, sir!"

"What do you regard as the qualifications?" asked the organizer.

"I've run for county office and got beat," said Wilbur: "and that takes you in, too, don't it, Jake?" he asked, turning to me.

Wilbur, like most of our older people, has a good memory. Most of the folks hereabouts had already forgotten that I was a candidate on Judge Stone's Reform and Anti-Monopoly ticket, for County Supervisor, in 1874, and that I was defeated with the rest. This was the only time I ever had anything to do with politics, more than to be a delegate to the county convention two or three times. I mention it here, because of the chance it gave Dick McGill to rake me over the coals in his scurrilous paper, the Monterey Centre Journal, that most people have always said was never fit to enter a decent home, but which they always subscribed for and read as quick as it came.

Within fifteen minutes after McGill got his paper to Monterey Centre he and what he had called the County Ring were as thick as thieves, and always stayed so as long as Dick had the county printing. So when I was put on the independent ticket to turn this ring out of office, Dick went after me as if I had been a horse-thief, and made a great to-do about what he called "Cow Vandemark's criminal record." Now that I have a chance to put the matter before the world in print, I shall take advantage of it; for that "criminal record" is a part of this history of Vandemark Township.

The story grew out of my joining the Settlers' Club in 1856. The rage for land speculation was sweeping over Iowa like a prairie fire, getting things all ready for the great panic of 1857 that I have read of since, but of which I never heard until long after it was over. All I knew was that there was a great fever for buying and selling land and laying out and booming town-sites—the sites, not the towns—and that afterward times were very hard. The speculators had bought up a good part of Monterey County by the end of 1856, and had run the price up as high as three dollars and a half an acre.

This made it hard for poor men who came in expecting to get it for a dollar and a quarter; and a number of settlers in the township, as they did all over the state, went on their land relying on the right to buy it when they could get the money—what was called the preemption right. I could see the houses of William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost from my house; and I knew that Peter and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn, Dunkards from Pennsylvania, had located farther south. All these settlers were located south of Hell Slew, which was coming to be known now, and was afterward put down on the map, as "Vandemark's Folly Marsh."

And now there came into the county and state a class of men called "claim-jumpers," who pushed in on the claims of the first comers, and stood ready to buy their new homes right out from under them. It was pretty hard on us who had pushed on ahead of the railways, and soaked in the rain and frozen in the blizzards, and lived on moldy bacon and hulled corn, to lose our chance to get title to the lands we had broken up and built on. It did not take long for a settler to see in his land a home for him and his dear ones, and the generations to follow; and we felt a great bitterness toward these claim-jumpers, who were no better off than we were.

My land was paid for, such as it was; but when the people who, like me, had drailed out across the prairies with the last year's rush, came and asked me to join the Settlers' Club to run these intruders off, it appeared to me that it was only a man's part in me to stand to it and take hold and do. I felt the old urge of all landowners to stand together against the landless, I suppose. What is title to land anyhow, but the right of those who have it to hold on to it? No man ever made land—except my ancestors, the Dutch, perhaps. All men do is to get possession of it, and run everybody else off, either with clubs, guns, or the sheriff.

I did not look forward to all the doings of the Settlers' Club, but I joined it, and I have never been ashamed of it, even when Dick McGill was slangwhanging me about what we did. I never knew, and I don't know now, just what the law was, but I thought then, and I think now, that the Settlers' Club had the right of it. I thought so the night we went over to run the claim-jumper off Absalom Frost's land, within a week of my joining.

It was over on Section Twenty-seven, that the claim-jumper had built a hut about where the schoolhouse now is, with a stable in one end of it, and a den in which to live in the other. He was a young man, with no dependents, and we felt no compunctions of conscience, that dark night, when two wagon-loads of us, one of which came from the direction of Monterey Centre, drove quietly up and knocked at the door.

"Who's there?" he said, with a quiver in his voice.

"Open up, and find out!" said a man in the Monterey Centre crowd, who seemed to take command as a matter of course. "Kick the door open, Dutchy!"

As he said this he stepped aside, and pushed me up to the door. I gave it a push with my knee, and the leader jerked me aside, just in time to let a charge of shot pass my head.

"It's only a single-barrel gun," said he. "Grab him!"

I was scared by the report of the gun, scared and mad, too, as I clinched with the fellow, and threw him; then I pitched him out of the door, when the rest of them threw him down and began stripping him. At the same time, some one kindled a fire under a kettle filled with tar, and in a few minutes, they were smearing him with it. This looked like going too far, to me, and I stepped back—I couldn't stand it to see the tar smeared over his face, even if it did look like a map of the devil's wild land, as he kicked and scratched and tried to bite, swearing all the time like a pirate. It seemed a degrading kind of thing to defile a human being in that way. The leader came up to me and said, "That was good work, Dutchy. Lucky I was right about its being a single-barrel, ain't it? Help get his team hitched up. We want to see him well started."

"All right, Mr. McGill," I said; for that was his name, now first told in all the history of the county.

"Shut up!" he said. "My name's Smith, you lunkhead!"

Well, we let the claim-jumper put on his clothes over the tar and feathers, and loaded his things into his wagon, hitched up his team, and whipped them up to a run and let them go over the prairie. All the time he was swearing that he would have blood for this, but he never stopped going until he was out of sight and hearing.

2

("What a disgraceful affair!" says my granddaughter Gertrude, as she finishes reading that page. "I'm ashamed of you, grandpa; but I'm glad he didn't shoot you. Where would I have been?" Well, it does seem like rather a shady transaction for me to have been mixed up in. The side of it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it was in my lifetime. It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur's time. I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill—or Cow Vandemark? But Gertrude has not yet heard all about that night's work.)

"Now," said McGill, "for the others! Load up, and come on. This fellow will never look behind him!"

But he did!

The next and the last stop, was away down on Section Thirty-five—two miles farther. I was feeling rather warnble-cropped, because of the memory of that poor fellow with the tar in his eyes—but I went all the same.

There was a little streak of light in the east when we got to the place, but we could not at first locate the claim-jumpers. They had gone down into a hollow, right in the very corner of the section, as if trying barely to trespass on the land, so as to be able almost to deny that they were on it at all, and were seemingly trying to hide. We could scarcely see their outfit after we found it, for they were camped in tall grass, and their little shanty was not much larger than a dry-goods box. Their one horse was staked out a little way off, their one-horse wagon was standing with its cover on beside a mound of earth which marked where a shallow well had been dug for water. I heard a rustling in the wagon as we passed it, like that of a bird stirring in the branches of a tree.

McGill pounded on the door.

"Come out," he shouted. "You've got company!"

There was a scrabbling and hustling around in the shanty, and low talking, and some one asked who was there; to which McGill replied for them to come out and see. Pretty soon, a little doddering figure of a man came to the door, pulling on his breeches with trembling hands as he stepped, barefooted, on the bare ground which came right up to the door-sill.

"What's wanted, gentlemen?" he quavered. "I cain't ask you to come in—jist yit. What's wanted?"

He had not said two words when I knew him for Old Man Fewkes, whom I had last seen back on the road west of Dyersville, on his way to "Negosha." Where was Ma Fewkes, and where were Celebrate Fourth and Surajah Dowlah? And where, most emphatically, where was Rowena? I stepped forward at McGill's side. Surely, I thought, they were not going to tar and feather these harmless, good-for-nothing waifs of the frontier; and even as I thought it, I saw the glimmering of the fire they were kindling under the tar-kettle.

"We want you, you infernal claim-jumper!" said McGill. "We'll show you that you can't steal the land from us hard-working settlers, you set of sneaks! Take off your clothes, and we'll give you a coat that will make you look more like buzzards than you do now."

"There's some of 'em runnin' away!" yelled one of the crowd. "Catch 'em!"

There was a flight through the grass from the back of the shanty, a rush of pursuit, some feeble yells jerked into bits by rough handling; and presently, Celebrate and Surajah were dragged into the circle of light, just as poor Ma Fewkes, with her shoulder-blades drawn almost together came forward and tried to tear from her poor old husband's arm the hand of an old neighbor of mine whose name I won't mention even at this late day. I will not turn state's evidence notwithstanding the Statute of Limitations has run, as N.V. Creede advises me, against any one but Dick McGill—and the reason for my exposing him is merely tit for tat. Ma Fewkes could not unclasp the hands; but she produced an effect just the same.

"Say," said a man who had all the time sat in one of the wagons, holding the horses. "You'd better leave out the stripping, boys!"

They began dragging the boys and the old man toward the tar-kettle, and McGill, with his hat drawn down over his eyes, went to the slimy mass and dipped into it a wooden paddle with which they had been stirring it. Taking as much on it as it would carry, he made as if to smear it over the old man's head and beard. I could not stand this—the poor harmless old coot!—and I ran up and struck McGill's arm.

"What in hell," he yelled, for some of the tar went on him, "do you mean!"

"Don't tar and feather 'em," I begged. "I know these folks. They are a poor wandering family, without money enough to buy land away from any one."

"We jist thought we'd kind o' settle down," said Old Man Fewkes whimperingly; "and I've got the money promised me to buy this land. So it's all right and straight!"

The silly old leatherhead didn't know he was doing anything against public sentiment; and told the very thing that made a case against him. I have found out since who the man was that promised him the money and was going to take the land; but that was just one circumstance in the land craze, and the man himself was wounded at Fort Donelson, and died in hospital—so I won't tell his name. The point is, that the old man had turned the jury against me just as I had finished my plea.

"You have got the money promised you, have you?" repeated McGill. "Grab him, boys!"

All this time I was wondering where Rowena could be. I recollected how she had always seemed to be mortified by her slack-twisted family, and I could see her as she meeched off across the prairie hack along the Old Ridge Road, as if she belonged to another outfit; and yet, I knew how much of a Fewkes she was, as she joined in the conversation when they planned their great estates in the mythical state of Negosha, or in Texas, or even in California. I grew hot with anger as I began to realize what a humiliation this tarring and feathering would be to her—and I kept wondering, as I have said, where she could be, even as I felt the thrill a man experiences when he sees that he must fight: and just as I felt this thrill, one of our men closed with the old fellow from behind, and wrenching his bird's-claw hands behind his back, thrust the wizened old bearded face forward for its coat of tar.

I clinched with our man, and getting a rolling hip-lock on him, I whirled him over my head, as I had done with so many wrestling opponents, and letting him go in mid-air, he went head over heels, and struck ten feet away on the ground. Then I turned on McGill, and with the flat of my hand, I slapped him over against the shanty, with his ears ringing. They were coming at me in an undecided way: for my onset had been both sudden and unexpected; when I saw Rowena running from the rear with a shotgun in her hand, which she had picked up as it leaned against a wagon wheel where one of our crowd had left it.

"Stand back!" she screamed. "Stand back, or I'll blow somebody's head off!"

I heard a chuckling laugh from a man sitting in one of the wagons, and a word or two from him that sounded like, "Good girl!" Our little mob fell back, the man I had thrown limping, and Dick McGill rubbing the side of his head. The dawn was now broadening in the east, and it was getting almost light enough so that faces might be recognized; and one or two of the crowd began to retreat toward the wagons.

"I'll see to it," said I, "that these people will leave this land, and give up their settlement on it."

"No we won't," said Rowena. "We'll stay here if we're killed."

"Now, Rowena," said her father, "don't be so sot. We'll leave right off. Boys, hitch up the horse. We'll leave, gentlemen. I was gittin' tired of this country anyway. It's so tarnal cold in the winter. The trees is in constant varder in Texas, an' that's where we'll go."

By this time the mob had retreated to their wagons, their courage giving way before the light of day, rather than our resistance; though I could see that the settlers had no desire to get into a row with one of their neighbors: so shouting warnings to the Fewkeses to get out of the country while they could, they drove off, leaving me with the claim-jumpers. I turned and saw poor Rowena throw herself on the ground and burst into a most frightful fit of hysterical weeping. She would not allow her father or her brothers to touch her, and when her mother tried to comfort her, she said "Go away, ma. Don't touch me!" Finally I went to her, and she caught my hand in hers and pressed it, and after I had got her to her feet—the poor ragged waif, as limpsey as a rag, and wearing the patched remnants of the calico dress I had bought for her on the way into Iowa the spring before—she broke down and cried on my shoulder. She sobbed out that I was the only man she had ever known. She wished to God she were a man like me. The only way I could stop her was to tell her that her face ought to be washed; when I said that to her, she stopped her sitheing and soon began making herself pretty: and she was quite gay on the road to my place, where I took them because I couldn't think of anything else to do with them, though I knew that the whole family, not counting Rowena, couldn't or wouldn't do enough work to pay the board of their horse.

3

They hadn't more than got there and eaten a solid meal, than Surajah asked me for tools so he could work on a patent mouse-trap he was inventing, and when I came in from work that evening, he was explaining it to Magnus Thorkelson, who had come over to borrow some sugar from me. Magnus was pretending to listen, but he was asking his questions of Rowena, who stood by more than half convinced that Surrager had finally hit upon his great idea—which was a mouse-trap that would always be baited, and with two compartments, one to catch the mice, and one to hold them after they were caught. When they went into the second compartment, they tripped a little lever which opened the door for a new captive, and at the same time baited the trap again.

It seemed as if Magnus could not understand what Surajah said, but that Rowena's speech was quite plain to him. After that, he came over every evening and Rowena taught him to read in McGuffey's Second Reader. I knew that Magnus had read this through time and again; but he said he could learn to speak the words better when Rowena taught him. The fact was, though, that he was teaching her more than she him; but she never had a suspicion of this. That evening Magnus came over and brought his fiddle. Pa Fewkes was quite disappointed when Magnus said he could not play the Money Musk nor Turkey in the Straw, nor the Devil's Dream, but when he went into one of his musical trances and played things with no tune to them but with a great deal of harmony, and some songs that almost made you cry, Rowena sat looking so lost to the world and dreamy that Magnus was moist about the eyes himself. He shook hands with all of us when he went away, so as to get the chance to hold Rowena's hand I guess.

Every day while they were there, Magnus came to see us; but did not act a bit like a boy who came sparking. He did not ask Rowena to sit up with him, though I think she expected him to do so; but he talked with her about Norway, and his folks there, and how lonely it was on his farm, and of his hopes that one day he would be a well-to-do farmer.

After one got used to her poor clothes, and when she got tamed down a little on acquaintance and gave a person a chance to look at her, and especially into her eyes, she was a very pretty girl. She had grown since I had seen her the summer before, and was fuller of figure. Her hair was still of that rich dark brown, just the color of her eyes and eyebrows. She had been a wild girl last summer, but now she was a woman, with spells of dreaming and times when her feelings were easily hurt. She still was ready to flare up and fight at the drop of the hat—because, I suppose, she felt that everybody looked down on her and her family; but to Magnus and me she was always gentle and sometimes I thought she was going to talk confidentially to me.

After she had had one of her lessons one evening she said to me, "I wish I wa'n't so darned infarnal ignorant. I wish I could learn enough to teach school!"

"We're all ignorant here," I said.

"Magnus ain't," said she. "He went to a big school in the old country. He showed me the picture of it, and of his father's house. It's got four stone chimneys."

"I wonder," said I, "if what they learn over there is real learning."

And that ended our confidential talk.

About the time I began wondering how long they were to stay with me, Buck Gowdy came careering over the prairie, driving his own horse, just as I was taking my nooning and was looking at the gun which Rowena had used to drive back the Settlers' Club, and which we had brought along with us. I thought I remembered where I had seen that gun, and when Buck came up I handed it to him.

"Here's your shotgun," I said. "It's the one you shot the geese with back toward the Mississippi."

"Good goose gun," said he. "Thank you for keeping it for me. I see you have caught me out getting acquainted with Iowa customs. If you had needed any help that night, you'd have got it."

"I came pretty near needing it," I said; "and I had help."

"I see you brought your help home with you," he said. "I think I recognize that wagon, don't I?" I nodded. "I wonder if they could come and help me on the farm. I'd like to see them. I need help, inside the house and out."

I left him talking with the whole Fewkes family, except Rowena, who kept herself out of sight somewhere, and went out to the stable to work. Gowdy was talking to them in that low-voiced, smiling way of his, with the little sympathetic tremor in his voice like that in the tone of an organ. He had already told Surajah that his idea for a mouse-trap looked like something the world had been waiting for, and that there might be a fortune in the scheme. Ma Fewkes was looking up at him, as if what he said must be the law and gospel. He had them all hypnotized, or as we called it then, mesmerized—so I thought as I went out of sight of them. After a while, Rowena came around the end of a haystack, and spoke to me.

"Mr. Gowdy wants us all to go to work for him," she said. "He wants pa and the boys to work around the place, and he says he thinks some of Surrager's machines are worth money. He'll give me work in the house."

"It looks like a good chance," said I.

"You know I don't know much about housework," said she; "poor as we've always been."

"You showed me how to make good bread," I replied.

"I could do well for a poor man," said Rowena, looking at me rather sadly. Then she waited quite a while for me to say something.

"Shall I go, Jake?" she asked, looking up into my face.

"It looks like a good chance for all of you," I answered.

"I don't want to," said she, "I couldn't stay here, could I? ... No, of course not!"

So away went the Fewkeses with Buck Gowdy. That is, Rowena went away with him in his buggy, and the rest of the family followed in a day or so with the cross old horse—now refreshed by my hay and grain, and the rest we had given him,—in their rickety one-horse wagon. I remember how Rowena looked back at us, her hair blowing about her face which looked, just a thought, pale and big-eyed, as the Gowdy buggy went off like the wind, with Buck's arm behind the girl to keep her from bouncing out.

This day's work was not to cease in its influence on Iowa affairs for half a century, if ever. State politics, the very government of the commonwealth, the history of Monterey County and of Vandemark Township, were all changed when Buck Gowdy went off over the prairie that day, holding Rowena Fewkes in the buggy seat with that big brawny arm of his. Ma Fewkes seemed delighted to see Mr. Gowdy holding her daughter in the buggy.

"Nobody can tell what great things may come of this!" she cried, as they went out of sight over a knoll.

She never said a truer thing. To be sure, it was only the hiring by a very rich man, as rich men went in those days, of three worthless hands and a hired girl; but it tore the state's affairs in pieces. Whenever I think of it I remember some verses in the Fifth Reader that my children used in school:

"Somewhere yet that atom's force Moves the light-poised universe[11]."

[11] See Gowdy vs. Buckner, et al, Ia. Rep. Also accounts of relations of the so-called Gowdy Estate litigation to "The Inside of Iowa Politics" by the editor of these MSS.—in press.—G.v.d.M.

It was a great deal more important then, though, that on that afternoon I was arrested for a great many things—assault with intent to commit great bodily injury, assault with intent to kill, just simple assault, unlawful assembly, rioting, and I don't know but treason. Dick McGill, I am sure it was, told the first claim-jumper we visited that I was at the head of the mob, and he had me arrested. I was taken to Monterey Centre by Jim Boyd, the blacksmith, who was deputy sheriff; but he did the fair thing and allowed me to get Magnus Thorkelson to attend to my stock while I was gone.

I think that that passage in the Scriptures which tells us to visit those who are in prison as well as the sick, is a thing that shows the Bible to be an inspired work; but, this belief has come to me through my remembrance of my sufferings when I was arrested. Not that I went to prison. In fact, I do not believe there was anything like a jail nearer than Iowa City or Dubuque; but Jim told me that he understood that I was a terrible ruffian and would have to be looked after very closely. He made me help him about the blacksmith shop, and I learned so much about blacksmithing that I finally set up a nice little forge on the farm and did a good deal of my own work. At last Jim said I was stealing his trade, and when Virginia Royall came down to the post-office the day the mail came in, which was a Friday in those days, and came to the shop to see me, he told her what a fearful criminal I was. She laughed and told Jim to stop his fooling, not knowing what a very serious thing it was for me.

When she asked me to come up to see the Elder and Grandma Thorndyke, and I told her I was a prisoner, Jim paroled me to her, and made her give him a receipt for me which he wrote out on the anvil on the leaf of his pass-book, and had her sign it. He said he was glad to get rid of me for two reasons: one was that I was stealing his trade, and the other that I was likely to bu'st forth at any time and kill some one, especially a claim-jumper if there were any left in the county, which he doubted.

So I went with Virginia and spent the night at the elder's. Grandma Thorndyke took my part, though she made a great many inquiries about Rowena Fewkes; but the elder warned me solemnly against lawlessness, though when we were alone together he made me tell him all about the affair, and seemed to enjoy the more violent parts of it as if it had been a novel; but when he asked me who were in the "mob" I refused to tell him, and he said maybe I was right—that my honor might be involved. Grandma Thorndyke seemed to have entirely got over her fear of having me and Virginia together, and let us talk alone as much as we pleased.

I told them about the quantity of wild strawberries I had out in Vandemark's Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and his wife and herself might go out there with me for a strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it incumbent upon him to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the sugar if I would pony up the cream—of which I had a plenty. So we had quite a banquet out on the farm. Once in a while I would forget about the assaults and the treason and be quite jolly—and then it would all come back upon me, and I would break out in a cold sweat. Out of this grew the first strawberry and cream festival ever held in any church in Monterey Centre, the fruit being furnished, according to the next issue of the Journal "by the malefactors confined in the county Bastille"—in other words by me.

4

Virginia and I gathered the berries, and she was as happy as she could be, apparently; but once in a while she would say, "Poor Teunis! Can't a Dutchman see a joke?"

After that, the elder and his wife used to come out to see me, bringing Virginia with them, almost every week, and I prided myself greatly on my fried chicken my nice salt-rising bread, my garden vegetables, my green corn, my butter, milk and cream. I had about forgotten about being arrested, when the grand jury indicted me, and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn went bail for me. When the trial came on I was fined twenty dollars, and before I could produce the money, it was paid by William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost, who told me that they got me into it, and it wasn't fair for a boy to suffer through doing what was necessary for the protection of the settlers, and what a lot of older men had egged him on to do. So I came out of it all straight, and was not much the less thought of. In fact, I seemed to have ten friends after the affair to one before. But Dick McGill, whose connection with it I have felt justified in exposing, still hounded me through his paper. I have before me the copy of the Journal—little four-page sheet yellowed with time, with the account of it which follows:

"A desperado named Vandemark, well known to the annals of local crime as 'Cow Vandemark,' was arrested last Wednesday for leading the riots which have cleaned out those industrious citizens who have been jumping claims in this county. A reporter of the Journal, which finds out everything before it happens, attended the ceremonies of giving some of these people a coat of tar and feathers, and can speak from personal observation as to the ferocity of this ruffian Vandemark—also from slight personal contact.

"This hardened wretch is in every feature a villain—except that he has a rosy complexion, downy whiskers, and buttermilk eyes, instead of the black flashing orbs of fiction. Sheriff Boyd decoyed him into town, skilfully avoiding any rousing of his tigerish disposition, and is now making a blacksmith of him—or was until yesterday, when he paroled him to Miss Virginia Royall, the ward of the Reverend Thorndyke.

"This is a very questionable policy. If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community. Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate of the criminal, known as Vandemark's Folly, and by the use of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob T. Vandemark—whom we hereby salute—we are promised another strawberry festival before the crop is gone.

"In the meantime, it is worthy of mention that the industry of claim-jumping has suffered a sudden slump, and that the splendid pioneers who have opened up this Garden of Eden will not be robbed of the fruits of their enterprise."

When I came to run for county supervisor, he rehashed the matter without giving any hint that after all what I did was approved of by the people of the county in 1856 when these things took place or that he himself was in it up to the neck! But enough of that: the historical fact is that Settlers' Clubs did work of this sort all over Iowa in those times, and right or wrong, the pioneers held to the lands they took up when the great tide of the Republic broke over the Mississippi and inundated Iowa. The history of Vandemark Township was the history of the state.



CHAPTER XV.

I SAVE A TREASURE, AND START A FEUD

In the month of May, 1857, I went to a party. This was a new thing for me; for parties had been something of which I had heard as of many things outside of the experience of a common fellow like me, but always had thought about as a thing only to be read of, like porte cocheres and riding to hounds, and butlers and books of poems. Stuff for story-books, and not for Vandemark Township; though when I saw the thing, it was not so very different from the dances and "sings" we used to have on the boats of the Grand Canal, as the Erie Ditch was then called when you wanted to put on a little style.

The party was at the "great Gothic house" of Governor Wade, just finished, over in Benton Township. The Governor was not even a citizen of Vandemark Township, but he had some land in it. Buck Gowdy's great estate lapped over on one corner of the township, Governor Wade's on the other, and Hell Slew, nicknamed Vandemark's Folly Marsh cut it through the middle, and made it hard for us to get out a full vote on anything after we got the township organized.

The control shifted from the north side of the slew to the south side according to the weather; for you couldn't cross Vandemark's Folly in wet weather. Once what was called the Cow Vandemark crowd got control and kept it for years by calling the township meetings always on our own side of the slew; and then Foster Blake sneaked in a full attendance on us when we weren't looking by piling a couple of my haystacks in the trail to drive on, and it was five years before we got it back. But in the meantime we had voted taxes on them to build some schoolhouses and roads. That was local politics in Iowa when Ring was a pup.

But Governor Wade's party was not local politics, or so N.V. Creede tells me. He says that this was one of the moves by which the governor made Monterey County Republican. It had always been Democratic. The governor had always been a Democrat, and had named his township after Thomas H. Benton; but now he was the big gun of the new Republican Party in our neck of the woods, and he invited all the people who he thought would be good wheel-horses.

You will wonder how I came to be invited. Well, it was this way. I called on Judge Stone at the new court-house, the building of which created such a scandal. He was county treasurer. He had been elected the fall before. I wanted to see him about a cattle deal. He was talking with Henderson L. Burns when I went in.

"I don't see how I can go," said he. "I've got to watch the county's money. If there was a safe in this county-seat any stronger than a cheese box, I'd lock it up and go; but I guess my bondsmen are sitting up nights worrying about their responsibility now. I'll have to decline, I reckon."

"Oh, darn the money!" said Henderson L. "You can't be expected to set up with it like it had typhoid fever, can you? Take it with you, and put it in Wade's big safe."

"I might do that," said Judge Stone, "if I had a body-guard."

"I'd make a good guard," said Henderson L. "Let me take care of it."

"I'd have to win it back in a euchre game if I ever saw it again," said the judge. "I hate to miss that party. There'll be some medicine made there. I might go with a body-guard, eh?"

"So if the Bunker gang gets after you," suggested H. L., "there'd be somebody paid to take the load of buckshot. Well, here's Jake. He's our local desperado. Ask Dick McGill, eh, Jake? He dared the shotgun the night they run that claim-jumper off. I know a feller that was there, and seen it—when he wa'n't seared blind. Take Jake."

2

The Bunker gang was a group of bandits that had their headquarters in the timber along the Iowa River near Eldora. They were afterward caught—some of them—and treated very badly by the officers who started to Iowa City with them. The officers, making quite a little posse, stopped at a tavern down in Tama County, I think it was at Fifteen Mile Grove, and took a drink or two too much. They had Old Man Bunker and one of the boys in the wagon tied or handcuffed, I never knew which; and while the posse was in the tavern getting their drinks the boy worked himself loose, and lay there under the buffalo robe when the men came back to take them on their journey to jail.

When they had got well started again, it was decided by the sheriff or deputy in charge that they would make Old Man Bunker tell who the other members were of their gang. So they took him out of the wagon and hung him to a tree to make him confess. When they let him down he stuck it out and refused. They strung him up again, and just as they got him hauled up they noticed that the boy—he wasn't over my age—was running away. They ran after the boy and, numbed as he was lying in the wagon in the winter's cold, he could not run fast, and they caught him. Then they remembered that they had left Old Man Bunker hanging when they chased off after the boy; and when they cut him down he was dead.

They were scared, drunk as they were, and after holding a council of war, they decided that they would make a clean sweep and hang the boy too—I forgot this boy's name. This they did, and came back telling the story that the prisoners had escaped, or been shot while escaping. I do not recall which. It was kind of pitiful; but nothing was ever done about it, though the story leaked out—being too horrible to stay a secret.

There was a great deal of sympathy with the Bunkers all over the country, I know where one of the men who did the deed lives now, out in Western Iowa, near Cherokee. He was always looked upon as a murderer here—and so, of course, he was, if he consented.

At the time when this conversation took place in Judge Stone's office, the Bunkers were in the heyday of their bad eminence, and while they were operating a good way off, there was some terror at the mention of their name. The judge looked me over for a minute when Henderson L. suggested me for the second time as a good man for his body-guard.

"Will you go, Jake?" he asked. "Or are you scared of the Bunkers?"

Now, as a general rule, I should have had to take half an hour or so to decide a thing like that; but when he asked me if I was scared of the Bunkers, it nettled me; and after looking from him to Henderson L. for about five minutes, I said I'd go. I was not invited to the party, of course; for it was an affair of the big bugs; but I never thought that an invitation was called for. I felt just as good as any one, but I was a little wamble-cropped when I thought that I shouldn't know how to behave.

"How you going, Judge?" asked Henderson L.

"In my family carriage," said the judge.

"The only family carriage I ever saw you have," said Henderson L., "is that old buckboard."

"I traded that off," answered the judge, "to a fellow driving through to the Fort Dodge country. I got a two-seated covered carriage. When it was new it was about such a rig as Buck Gowdy's."

"That's style," said Burns. "Who's going with you—of course there's you and your wife and now you have Jake; but you've got room for one more."

"My wife," said the judge, "is going to take the preacher's adopted daughter. The preacher's wife thought there might be worldly doings that it might be better for her and the elder to steer clear of, but the girl is going with us."

"Well, Jake," said Henderson L., "you're in luck. You'll ride to the party with your old flame, in a carriage. My wife and I are going on a load of hay. Jim Boyd is the only other man here that's got a rig with springs under it. The aristocracy of Monterey County, a lot of it, will ride plugs or shank's mares. You're getting up among 'em, Jakey, my boy. Never thought of this when you were in jail, did you?"

Nobody can realize how this talk made me suffer; and yet I kind of liked it. I suffered more than ever, because I had not seen Virginia for a long time for several reasons. I quit singing in the choir in the fall, when it was hard getting back and forth with no horses, and the heavy snow of the winter of 1855-6 began coming down.

It was a terrible winter. The deer were all killed in their stamping grounds in the timber, where they trod down the snow and struggled to get at the brush and twigs for forage. The settlers went in on snowshoes and killed them with clubs and axes. We never could have preserved the deer in a country like this, where almost every acre was destined to go under plow—but they ought to have been given a chance for their lives. I remember once when I was cussing[12] the men who butchered the pretty little things while Magnus Thorkelson was staying all night with me to help me get my stock through a bad storm—it was a blizzard, but we had never heard the word then—and as I got hot in my blasting and bedarning of them (though they needed the venison) he got up and grasped my hand, and made as if to kiss me.

[12] "Cussing" and "cursing" are quite different things, insists the author. He would never have cursed any one, he protests; but a man is always justified in cussing when a proper case for it is presented.—G.v.d.M.

"It is murder," said he, and backed off.

I felt warmed toward him for wanting to kiss me, though I should have knocked him down if he had. He told me it was customary for men to kiss each other sometimes, in Norway. The Dunkards—like the Bohns and Bemisdarfers—were the only Americans I ever knew anything about (if they really were Americans, talking Pennsylvania Dutch as they did) who ever practised it. They greeted each other with a "holy kiss" and washed each other's feet at their great communion meeting every year. I never went but once. The men kissed the men and the women the women. So I never went but once; though they "fed the multitude" as a religious function—and if there are any women who can cook bread and meat so it will melt in your mouth, it is the Pennsylvania Dutch women. And the Bohn and Bemisdarfer women seem to me the best cooks among them, they and the Stricklers. They taught most of our wives the best cookery they know.

I was disappointed when we started from Monterey Centre, with Judge Horace Stone and me in the front seat, and Virginia in the back. As I started to say a while back, I had not been singing in the choir during the winter. The storms kept me looking out for my stock until the snow went off in the February thaw that covered Vandemark's Folly with water from bluff to bluff; and by that time I had stayed out so long that I thought I ought to be coaxed back into the choir by Virginia or Grandma Thorndyke in order to preserve my self-respect. But neither of them said anything about it. In fact, I thought that Grandma Thorndyke was not so friendly in the spring as she had been in the fall—and, of course, I could not put myself forward. I had the pure lunkhead pride.

So I had not seen Virginia for months. We early Iowa settlers, the men and women who opened up the country to its great career of development, shivered through that winter and many like it, in hovels that only broke the force of the tempest but could not keep it back. The storms swept across without a break in their fury as we cowered there, with no such shelters as now make our winters seemingly so much milder. Now it is hard to convince a man from the East that our state was once bare prairie.

"It's funny," said the young doctor that married a granddaughter of mine last summer, "that all your groves of trees seem to be in rows. Left them that way, I suppose, when you cut down the forest."

The country looks as well wooded as the farming regions of Ohio or Indiana. Trees grew like weeds when we set them out; and we set them out as the years passed, by the million. I never went to the timber when the sap was down, without bringing home one or more elms, lindens, maples, hickories or even oaks—though the latter usually died. Most of the lofty trees we see in every direction now, however, are cottonwoods, willows and Lombardy poplars that were planted by the mere sticking in the ground of a wand of the green tree. They hauled these "slips" into Monterey County by the wagon-load after the settlers began their great rush for the prairies; and how they grew! It was no bad symbol of the state itself—a forest on four wheels.

What I began to write a few moments ago, though concerned the difference between our winter climate then and now. Then the snow drifted before our northwest winds in a moving ocean unbroken by corn-field, grove, or farmstead. It smothered and overwhelmed you when caught out in it; and after a drifting storm, the first groves we could see cast a shadow in the blizzard; and there lay to the southeast of every block of trees a long, pointed drift, diminishing to nothing at the point where ended the influence of the grove—this new foe to the tempest which civilization was planting. Our groves were yet too small of course to show themselves in this fight against the elements that first winter, and there I had hung like a leaf caught on a root in a freshet, an eighteen-year-old boy, lonely, without older people to whom I could go for advice or comfort, and filled with dreams, visions and doubts, and with no bright spot in my frosty days and frostier nights but my visions and dreams.

And I suppose my loneliness, my hardships, my lack of the fireplaces of York State and the warm rooms that we were used to in a country where fuel was plentiful, made my visions and dreams more to me than they otherwise would have been. It is the hermit who loses the world in his thoughts. And I dreamed of two things—my mother, and Virginia. Of my mother I found myself thinking with less and less of that keenness of grief which I had felt at Madison the winter before, and on my road west; so I used to get out the old worn shoe and the rain-stained letter she had left for me in the old apple-tree and try to renew my grief so as to lose the guilty feeling of which I was conscious at the waning sense of my loss of her. This was a strife against the inevitable; at eighteen—or at almost any other age, to the healthy mind—it is the living which calls, not the dead.

In spite of myself, it was Virginia Royall to whom my dreams turned all the time. Whether in the keen cold of the still nights when the howl of the wolves came to me like the cries of torment, or in the howling tempests which roared across my puny hovel like trampling hosts of wild things, sifting the snow in at my window, powdering the floor, and making my cattle in their sheds as white as sheep, I went to sleep every night thinking of her, and thinking I should dream of her—but never doing so; for I slept like the dead. I held her in my arms again as I had done the night Ann Gowdy had died back there near Dubuque, all senseless in her faint; or as I had when I scared the wolves away from her back along the Old Ridge Road; or as when I had carried her across the creek back in our Grove of Destiny—and she always, in my dreams, was willing, and conscious that I held her so tight because I loved her.

I saw her again as she played with her doll under the trees. Again I rode by her side into Waterloo; and again she ran back to me to bid me her sweet good-by after I had given her up. Often I did not give her up, but brought her to my new home, built my house with her to cheer me; and often I imagined that she was beside me, sheltered from the storm and happy while she could be by my side and in my arms. Oh, I lived whole lives over and over again with Virginia that lonely winter. She had been such a dear little creature. I had been able to do so much for her in getting her away from what she thought a great danger. She had done so much for me, too. Had not she and I cried together over the memory of my mother? Had she not been my intimate companion for weeks, cooked for me, planned for me, advised me, dreamed with me? It was not nearly so lonely as you might think, in one sense of the word.

And now I had not seen her for such a long time that I wondered if she were not forgetting me. No wonder that I was a little flighty, as I crowded myself into my poor best suit which I was so rapidly outgrowing, and walked into Monterey Centre in time to be Judge Horace Stone's body-guard the night of the party—I heard it called a reception—at Governor DeWitt Clinton Wade's new Gothic house, over in Benton Township that was to be.

I was proportionately miserable when I called at Elder Thorndyke's, to find that Virginia was not ready to see me, and that Grandma Thorndyke seemed cool and somehow different toward me. When she left me, I slipped out and went to Stone's.

"Thought you wasn't coming, Jake," said he. "Almost give you up. Just time for you to get a bite to eat before we start."

3

When we did start, his wife came out in a new black silk dress—for the Stones were quality—and was helped into the back seat, and the judge came out of the house carrying a satchel which when he handed it to me I found to be very heavy. I should say, as I have often stated, that it weighed about fifty to sixty pounds, and when he shoved it back under the seat before sitting down, it gave as I seemed to remember afterward a sort of muffled jingle.

"The treasures of Golconda, or Goldarnit," said he, "or some of those foreign places. Hear 'em jingle? Protect them with your life, Jake."

"All right," I said, as glum as you please; for he had left the only vacant place in the carriage back with Mrs. Stone. This was no way to treat me! But I was almost glad when Virginia came out to the carriage wearing a pink silk dress, and looking so fearful to the eyes of her obscure adorer that he could scarcely speak to her—she was so unutterably lovely and angelic-looking.

"How do you do, Teunis!" said she, and paused for some one to help her in. Judge Stone waited a moment, and gave her a boost at the elbow as she skipped up the step. I could have bitten myself. I was the person who should have helped her in. I was a lummox, a lunkhead, a lubber, a fool, a saphead—I was everything that was awkward and clumsy and thumb-hand-sided! To let an old married man get ahead of me in that way was a crime. I slouched down into the seat, and the judge drove off, after handing me a revolver. I slipped it into my pocket.

"Jake's my body-guard to-night, Miss Royall," said the judge. "We've got the county's money here. Did you hear it jingle?"

"No, Judge, I didn't," said she, and she never could remember any jingle afterward.

"Aren't you afraid, Teunis?"

"What of?" I inquired, looking around at her, just as she was spreading a beautiful Paisley shawl about her shoulders. I dared now take a long look at her. A silk dress and a Paisley shawl, even to my eyes, and I knew nothing about their value or rarity at that time and place, struck me all of a heap with their gorgeousness. They reminded me of the fine ladies I had seen in Albany and Buffalo.

"Of the Bunker boys," said she. "If they knew that we were out with all this money, don't you suppose they would be after it? And what could you and Mr. Stone do against such robbers?"

"I've seen rougher customers than they are," said I; and then I wondered if the man I had seen with the Bushyagers back in our Grove of Destiny had not been one of the Bunker boys. They certainly had had a bunch of stolen horses. If he was a member of the Bunker gang, weren't the Bushyagers members of it also? And was it not likely that they, being neighbors of ours, and acquainted with everything that went on in Monterey Centre, would know that we were out with the money, and be ready to pounce upon us? I secretly drew my Colt from my pocket and looked to see that each of the five chambers was loaded, and that each tube had its percussion cap. I wished, too, that I had had a little more practise in pistol shooting.

"What do you think of Virginia's dress and shawl?" asked Mrs. Stone, as we drove along the trail which wound over the prairie, in disregard of section lines, as all roads did then. The judge and I both looked at Virginia again.

"They're old persimmons," commented the judge. "You'll be the belle of the ball, Virginia."

"They're awful purty," said I, "especially the dress. Where did you get 'em, Virginia?"

"They were found in Miss Royall's bedroom," said Mrs. Stone emphasizing the "Miss"—for my benefit, I suppose; but it never touched me. "But I guess she knows where they come from."

"They were Ann's," said Virginia, a little sadly, and yet blushing and smiling a little at our open admiration, "my sister's, you know."

I scarcely said another word during all that trip. I was furious at the thought of Buck Gowdy's smuggling those clothes into Virginia's room, so she could have a good costume for the party. How did he know she was invited, or going? To be sure, her sister Ann's things ought to have been given to the poor orphan girl—that was all right; but back there along the road she would never speak his name. Had it come to pass in all these weeks and months in which I had not seen her that they had come to be on speaking terms again? Had that scoundrel who had killed her sister, after a way of speaking, and driven Virginia herself to run away from him, and come to me, got back into her good graces so that she was allowing him to draw his wing around her again? It was gall and wormwood to think of it. But why were the dress and shawl smuggled into her room, instead of being brought openly? Maybe they were not really on terms of association after all. I wished I knew, or that I had the right to ask. I forgot all about the Bunkers, until the judge whipped up the horses as we turned into the Wade place, and brought us up standing at the door.

"Well," said he, with a kind of nervous laugh, "the Bunkers didn't get us after all!"

I was out before him this time, and helped Virginia and Mrs. Stone to get down. The judge was wrestling with the heavy bag. The governor came out to welcome us, and he and Judge Stone carried it in. Mrs. Wade, a scared-looking little woman, stood in the hall and gave me her hand as I went in.

"Good evening, Mr.——," said she.

"Mr. Vandemark," said the judge. "My body-guard, Mrs. Wade."

The good lady looked at my worn, tight-fitting corduroys, at my clean boiled shirt which I had done up myself, at my heavy boots, newly greased for the occasion, and at my bright blue and red silk neckerchief, and turned to other guests. After all I was dressed as well as some of the rest of them. There are many who may read this account of the way the Boyds, the Burnses, the Flemings, the Creedes, the Stones and others of our county aristocracy, came to this party in alpacas, delaines, figured lawns, and even calicoes, riding on loads of hay and in lumber wagons with spring seats, who may be a little nettled when a plain old farmer tells it; but they should never mind this: the time will come when their descendants will be proud of it. For they were the John Aldens, the Priscillas, the Miles Standishes and the Dorothy Q's of as great a society as the Pilgrim Fathers and Pilgrim Mothers set a-going: the society of the great commonwealth of Iowa.

The big supper—I guess they would call it a dinner now—served in the large room on a long table and some smaller ones, was the great event of the party. The Wades were very strict church-members. Such a thing as card playing was not to be thought of, and dancing was just as bad. Both were worldly amusements whose feet took hold on hell. We have lost this strictness now, and sometimes I wonder if we have not lost our religion too.

The Wades were certainly religious—that is the Governor and Mrs. Wade. Jack Wade, the John P. Wade who was afterward one of the national bosses of the Republican party, and Bob, the Robert S. Wade who became so prominent in the financial circles of the state, were a little worldly. A hired hand I once had was with the Wades for a while, and said that when he and the Wade boys were out in the field at work (for they worked as hard as any of the hands, and Bob was the first man in our part of the country who ever husked a hundred bushels of corn in a day) the Wade boys and the hired men cussed and swore habitually. But this scamp, when they were having family worship, used to fill in with "Amen!" and "God grant it!" and the like pious exclamations when the governor was offering up his morning prayer. But one morning Bob Wade brought a breast-strap from off the harness, and took care to kneel within easy reach of the kneeling hired man's pants. When he began with his responses that morning, a loud slap, and a smothered yell disturbed the governor—but he only paused, and went on.

"What in hell," asked the hired man when they got outside, "did you hit me for with that blasted strap?"

"To show you how to behave," said Bob. "When the governor is talking to the Lord, you keep your mouth shut."

I tell this, because it shows how even our richest and most aristocratic family lived, and how we were supposed to defend religion against trespass. I am told that in some countries the wickedest person is likely to be a praying one. It seems, however, that in this country the church-members are expected to protect their monopoly of the ear of God. Anyhow, Bob Wade felt that he was doing a fitting if not a very seemly thing in giving this physical rebuke to a man who was pretending to be more religious than he was. The question is a little complex; but the circumstance shows that there could be no cards or dancing at the Wade's party.

Neither could there be any drinking. The Wades had a vineyard and made wine. The Flemings lived in the next farm-house down the road, and when our party took place, the families were on fairly good terms; though the governor and his wife regarded the Flemings as beneath them, and this idea influenced the situation between the families when Bob Wade began showing attentions to Kittie Fleming, a nice girl a year or so older than I. Charlie Fleming, the oldest of the boys, was very sick one fall, and they thought he was going to die. Doctor Bliven prescribed wine, and the only wine in the neighborhood was in the cellar of Governor Wade; so, even though the families were very much at the outs, owing to the fuss about Bob and Kittie going together, Mrs. Fleming went over to the Wades' to get some wine for her sick boy.

"We can't allow you to have it," said the governor, with his jaws set a little closer than usual. "We keep wine for sacramental purposes only."

This proves how straight they were about violating their temperance vows, and how pious. Though there are some lines of poetry in the Fifth Reader which seem to show that the governor missed a real sacrament. They read:

"Who gives himself with his alms feeds three— Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me;"

but Governor Wade was a practical man who made his religion fit what he wanted to do, and what he felt was the proper thing. Bob and Jack were worldly, like the rest of us. The governor got the reputation of being a hard man, and the wine incident did a good deal to add to it. The point is that there had to be some other way of entertaining the company at the party, besides drinking, card-playing, or dancing. Of course the older people could discuss the price of land, the county organization and the like; but even the important things of the country were mostly in the hands of young people—and young folks will be young folks.

4

Kittie Fleming was a pretty black-eyed girl, who afterward made the trouble between Bob Wade and his father. At this party the thing which made it a sad affair to me was the attentions paid to Virginia by Bob. I might have been comforted by the nice way Kittie Fleming treated me, if I had had eyes for any one but Virginia; but when Kittie smiled on me, I always thought how much sweeter was Virginia's smile. But her smiles that evening were all for Bob Wade. In fact, he gave nobody else a chance. It really seemed as if the governor and his wife were pleased to see him deserting Kittie Fleming, but whether or not this was because they thought the poor orphan Virginia a better match, or for the reason that any new flame would wean him from Kittie I could not say. And I suppose they thought Kittie's encouraging behavior to me was not only a proof of her low tastes, or rather her lack of ambition, but a sure sign to Bob that she was not in his class. So far as I was concerned I was wretched, especially when the younger people began turning the gathering into a "play party."

Now there was a difference between a play party and a kissing party or kissing bee, as we used to call it. The play party was quite respectable, and could be indulged in by church-members. In it the people taking part sang airs each with its own words, and moved about in step to the music. The absence of the fiddle and the "calling off" and the name of dancing took the curse off. They went through figures a lot like dances; swung partners by one hand or both; advanced and retreated, "balanced to partners" bowing and saluting; clasping hands, right and left alternately with those they met; and balanced to places, and the like. Sometimes they had a couple to lead them, as in the dance called the German, of which my granddaughter tells me; but usually they were all supposed to know the way the play went, and the words were always such as to help. Here is the one they started off with that night:

"We come here to bounce around, We come here to bounce around, We come here to bounce around, Tra, la, la! Ladies, do si do, Gents, you know, Swing to the right, And then to the left, And all promenade!"

Oh, yes! I have seen Wades and Flemings and Holbrooks and all the rest singing and hopping about to the tune of We Come Here to Bounce Around; and also We'll All Go Down to Rowser; and Hey, Jim Along, Jim Along Josie; and Angelina Do Go Home; and Good-by Susan Jane; and Shoot the Buffalo; and Weevilly Wheat; and Sandy He Belonged to the Mill; and I've Been to the East, I've Been to the West, I've Been to the Jay-Bird's Altar; and Skip-to-My-Lou; and The Juniper Tree; and Go In and Out the Window; and The Jolly Old Miller; and Captain Jinks; and lots more of them. Boyds and Burnses and Smythes tripping the light fantastic with them, and not half a dozen dresses better than alpacas in the crowd, and the men many of them in drilling trousers—and half of them with hayseed in their hair from the load on which they rode to the party! So, ye Iowa aristocracy, put that in your pipes and smoke it, as ye bowl over the country in your automobiles—or your airships, as I suppose it may be before you read this!