The spring nights which came to me there at Colony were of a quality quite new to me. The breeze, amiable and moist, was Southern, and the moonlight falling from the sky like a silent, all-enveloping cataract of silver, lay along the ground so mystically real that I could feel it with my hand. The air was at once tropic and Western, and this subtle blending of the North and the South, the strange and the familiar, appealed to me with such power that I wrote Zulime a statement of my belief that in becoming a part-owner in this land, I had assured for us both a happy and prosperous future. "I shall come here every spring," I declared, and in the glow of this enthusiasm, I purchased another farm of two hundred and forty acres and arranged with Seger for its management. Alas, for my piece of mind! On my way homeward, at Reno, I encountered a simoon of most appalling power. An equatorial wind which pressed against the car and screamed at the window--a hot, unending pitiless blast withering the grain and tearing the heart out of young gardens--a storm which brought back to me the dreadful blizzard of dust which swept over our Iowa farm in the spring of '72. There was something grand as well as sorrowful in this unexpected display of desert ferocity. My dream of a thousand-acre ranch shriveled with the plants. The prairie abandoning its youthful, buoyant air, took on a sinister and savage grandeur. To escape from the ashes of these ruined fields was now a passionate desire. The value of my land in Washitay fell almost to the vanishing point. Illinois became a green and pleasant pasture toward which I drove with gratitude and relief. [I insert a line to say that this was only a mood. I went on with my purchase of lands till I had my thousand acres, but these acres were in scattered plots and the house with the patio and the porch was never built.] At the Agency just before I left for the North I had hired some Cheyenne women to make for me a large council teepee which I had in mind to set up as my dwelling at Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime and I had agreed to spend the summer. Boyishly eager to reproduce as well as I could a Cheyenne house, I assembled all my blankets, parfleches, willow beds and other furnishings and raised my lodge on poles on the edge of the wood just inside the Camp's entrance. It made a singularly appropriate addition to the reservation, to my thinking, at least, and I took inordinate pride in its ownership. Trim and white and graceful it stood against the forest wall, its crossed poles sprangling from its top with poetic suggestion of aboriginal life, and when, with elaborate ceremony, I laid the fuel for its first fire, calling upon our patron, Wallace Heckman, to touch a match to the tinder, I experienced a sense of satisfaction.