THE TEST A boisterous wind swept the high plain and round, white-edged clouds rolled across the sky.

The grass that ran back from the horizon was parched, and in the distance a white streak of blowing dust marked a dried alkali lake.

Dust of dark color drove along the row of wooden stores and houses that fronted the railroad track, across which three grain elevators rose like castles.

The telegraph posts along the track melted into the level waste, and behind the spot where they vanished the tops of a larger group of elevators cut the edge of the plain.
The street was not paved, and the soil was deeply ploughed by wheels.
The soil was the black gumbo in which the wheat plant thrives, but the town occupied the fringe of a dry belt and farming had not made much progress.

Now, however, a company was going to irrigate the land with water from a river fed by the Rockies' snow.