"
As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his
eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed
as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he
first came. Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie
dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the
slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with
their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new
life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which did not
beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians;
square-jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered,
loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair,
looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them
all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on
each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted
himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half
contempt and half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with
phlegm upon his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot
or the cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed
in the throng here and there.
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