Now and then the stove crackled, or the lamp flickered, and any one unused to the prairie would have felt the little loghouse very desolate and lonely.

There was no other human habitation within a league, only a great waste of whitened grass relieved about the homestead by the raw clods of the fall plowing, for, while his scattered neighbors for the most part put their trust in horses and cattle, Winston had been among the first to realize the capacities of that land as a wheat-growing country.
Now, clad in well-worn jean trousers and an old deerskin jacket, he looked down at the bundle of documents on his knee, accounts unpaid, a banker's intimation that no more checks would be honored, and a mortgage deed.

They were not pleasant reading, and the man's face clouded as he penciled notes on some of them, but there was no weakness or futile protest in it.

Defeat was plain between the lines of all he read, but he was going on stubbornly until the struggle was ended, as others of his kind had done, there at the western limit of the furrows of the plow and in the great province farther east which is one of the world's granaries.

They went under and were forgotten, but they showed the way, and while their guerdon was usually six feet of prairie soil, the wheatfields, mills, and railroads came, for it is written plainly on the new Northwest that no man may live and labor for himself alone, and there are many who realizing it instinctively ask very little and freely give their best for the land that but indifferently shelters them.
Presently, however, there was a knocking at the door, and though this was most unusual Winston only quietly moved his head when a bitter blast came in, and a man wrapped in furs stood in the opening.
"I'll put my horse in the stable while I've got my furs on.