A gentleman in Clarksville explained the origin of the term "piker" to me thus: "In the early days men from Pike County, Missouri, and Pike County, Illinois, went all through the West. They were all good men. In fact, they were such a fine lot that when any crooks would want to represent themselves as honest men they would say they were from Pike. As a result of this all the bad men in the West claimed to be from our section, and in that way Pike got a bad name. So when the westerners suspected a man of being crooked, they'd say: 'Look out for him; he's a Piker.'" In St. Louis I was given another version. There I was told that long ago men would come down from Pike to gamble. They loved cards, but oftentimes hadn't enough money to play a big game. So, it was said, the term "Piker" came to indicate more or less the type it indicates to-day. No bit of character and color which we met upon our travels remains in my mind more pleasantly than the talk we had with those fine old men around the stove in the back room of the bank of Mr. John O. Roberts, there at Clarksville. Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's a book in him, and I hope that somebody will write it, for I should like to read that book. As we were leaving the bank another gentleman came in. We were introduced to him. His name proved also to be John O. Roberts--for he was the banker's son. "Yes," the elder Mr. Roberts explained to me, "and there's another John O. Roberts, too--my grandson. We're all John O. Robertses in this family. We perpetuate the name because it's an honest name. No John O. Roberts ever went to the penitentiary--or to the legislature." THE BEGINNING OF THE WEST CHAPTER XXII KANSAS CITY If you will take a map of the United States and fold it so that the Atlantic and Pacific coast lines overlap, the crease at the center will form a line which runs down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. That is not, however, the true dividing line between East and West. If I were to try to draw the true line, I should begin at the north, bringing my pencil down between the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, leaving the former to the east, and the latter to the west, and I should follow down through the middle of Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, so that St. Louis would be included on the eastern map and Kansas City and Omaha on the western. My companion and I had long looked forward to the West, and had speculated as to where we should first meet it. And sometimes, as we traveled on, we doubted that there really was a West at all, and feared that the whole country had become monotonously "standardized," as was recently charged by a correspondent of the London "Times."