The Tenderfoots

FROM where he sat in the crowded day-coach, Philip Trask's outlook was bounded by the backward-wheeling plain of eastern Colorado on one hand, and on the other by the scarcely less uninteresting cross-section of humanity filling the car to its seating capacity. Much earlier in the day he had exhausted the possibilities of the view from the car window. Shack-built prairie towns, steadily lessening in size and importance with the westward flight, had later given place to widely separated sod houses, the outworks of a slowly advancing army of pioneer homesteaders. Now even these had been left behind and there was nothing but the treeless, limitless plain, with only an occasional prairie-dog town or, more rarely, a flying herd of antelope, their fawn-colored bodies fading to invisibility in the fallow-dun distances, to break the monotony.

New England born and bred, provincial, and just now with a touch of belated homesickness acute enough to make him contrast all things primitive with the particular sort of civilization he had left behind, Philip owned to no kindling enthusiasm for the region which the school books were still teaching children to call the Great American Desert. A student by choice, with an unfinished college course for his keenest regret, he had left New Hampshire six months earlier on a plain quest of bread. Though the migrating moment was late in the year 1879, the aftermath of the panic of '73 still lingered in the East; and while there was work to be had for immigrant brawn, there was little enough for native brain.