Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty packing-case to-night after supper, said that civilization was a curse. “Look what it’s doing to your noble Red Man right here in your midst! There was a time, when a brave died, they handsomely killed that dead brave’s favorite horse, feeling he would course the plains of Heaven in peace. Now, I find, they have their doubts, and they pick out a dying old bone-yard whose day is over, or an outlaw that nobody can break and ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It’s the same with us whites. Here we are, us two, with—”

But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the sake of seeing it bend.

“Can you imagine anything lovelier,” I remarked as a derailer, “than the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?”

Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.

“Think of LaVÉrendrye, who was their Columbus,” he meditated aloud. “Going on and on, day by day, week by week, wondering what was beyond that world of plain and slough and coulÉe and everlasting green! And they tell me there’s four hundred million arable acres of it. I wonder if old VÉrendrye ever had an inkling of what Whittier felt later on:

Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given him an entirely false idea of the prairie, since from the Bryant poem he’d expected to see grass up to his armpits. And he’d been disappointed, too, by the scarcity of birds and flowers.

But I couldn’t let that complaint go by unchallenged. I told him of our range-lilies and foxglove and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot and wild sunflowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets in some sections. “And the prairie-grasses, Peter—don’t forget the prairie-grasses,” I concluded, perplexed for a moment by the rather grim smile that crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face.

“I’m not likely to,” he remarked.

For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to cut hay. He has been speaking of it as going into the wilderness for meditation. But what he’s really doing is taking a team and his tent and supplies and staying with that hay until it’s cut, cut and “collected,” to use the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into these parts.

I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues that’s sending Peter out into his wilderness. But I’ve been busy getting his grub-box ready and I can at least see that he fares well. For whatever happens, we must have hay. And before long, since we’re to go in more and more for live stock, we must have a silo at Alabama Ranch. Now that the open range is a thing of the past, in this part of the country at least, the silo is the natural solution of the cattle-feed problem. It means we can double our stock, which is rather like getting another farm for nothing, especially as the peas and oats we can grow for ensilage purposes give such enormous yields on this soil of ours.