small trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check
without further comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one
end of the trunk and dragged it into the express room. The agent's
manner seemed to remind him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to
be a very big place," he remarked, looking about.

"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the
trunk into a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He
chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama
securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case
under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the
town, as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great
fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at
the farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up
from the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat
stood yellow and the tin roofs and weathercocks were twinkling in
the fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the
sun was sinking and the farm wagons on their way home from town
came rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze.
When one of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift,
he clambered in willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man
with a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's.
"How fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and
started off.

"Do you go by the Ericson place?"