Osborn owned at once to being short-handed and said that I might go to work next morning, if I wished, and then went on, in business-like fashion, to explain that the wages were twelve and a half cents an hour for ten hours’ work and that his wife would board me for three dollars and a half a week. “Very well,” I said, “I’ll take the job.” “You can go right over to the house,” he went on, “or wait here and go home with us at six o’clock.” I much preferred to wait and leave explanations to the boss, for my attempts at explaining myself to the women folk of my employers had not always ended in leaving me perfectly at ease. The present situation could be taken in at a glance. Four miles farther on the road was the town of Kearney, built out, for the most part, to the north of the line. The station at Buda was the conventional frame building, with a pen for cattle at one end and a fenced platform for transferring the stock to the cattle-cars. A siding ran for a hundred yards or more beside the main line, and a few steps beyond it and across the main-travelled road was the section-boss’s shanty, a lightly built wooden shell, unpainted and weather-stained. Near an end of the siding, with a few feet of rails spanning the distance between, stood a little structure not unlike an overgrown kennel, where the hand-car for the men and the section tools were housed. For a space about the station and the boss’s shanty and on either side the railway and the road it was clear, then began the inevitable corn that stood full-grown on the prairie as far as the eye could see. The shadow of the station lay across the high prairie grass under its eastern wall, and there I lay down to rest. If I had failed of work at Buda, I should have thought little of it and should have walked on as a matter of course to further search in Kearney or in the country about the town. But having found a job and knowing that I had only to rest until going to work in the morning, there came a feeling of languor which it was a luxury to indulge. As I lay there in the high prairie grass at the end of another stretch of nearly 200 miles of walking, and looked dreamily up at the sky and thought contentedly of my new post, every muscle relaxed, and the will to summon them to action seemed gone, until the mere thought of further effort for that day was an agony which one harbored for the edge it gave to the sense of ease. It was difficult to respond even to a call to supper. But I got to my feet at six o’clock and joined the gang, and together, after storing the tools, we walked over to the boss’s shanty. On a bench outside the kitchen-door were tin basins and soap and water, with the usual roller towel, and soon we were waiting for a summons to the evening meal.