Later in the day, when the holder of the mortgage appeared upon the scene, fully expecting to foreclose, he was surprised at receiving payment in full. He receipted, mounted his horse, and set out on his return to town. But on the way back a strange thing befell him. He was held up and robbed by three mysterious masked men. CHAPTER XXVII KANSAS JOURNALISM Everything I had ever heard of Kansas, every one I had ever met from Kansas, everything I had ever imagined about Kansas, made me anxious to invade that State. With the exception of California, there was no State about which I felt such a consuming curiosity. Kansas is, and always has been, a State of freaks and wonders, of strange contrasts, of individualities strong and sometimes weird, of ideas and ideals, and of apocryphal occurrences. Just think what Kansas has been, and has had, and is! Think of the border warfare over slavery which began as early as 1855; of settlers, traveling out to "bleeding Kansas" overland, from New England, merely to add their abolition votes; of early struggles with the soil, and of the final triumph. Kansas is to-day the first wheat State, the fourth State in the value of its assessed property (New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts only outranking it), and the only State in the Union which is absolutely free from debt. It has a more American population, greater wealth and fewer mortgages per capita, more women running for office, more religious conservatism, more political radicalism, more students in higher educational institutions in proportion to its population, more homogeneity, more individualism, and more nasal voices than any other State. As Colonel Nelson said to me: "All these new ideas they are getting everywhere else are old ideas in Kansas." And why shouldn't that be true, since Kansas is the State of Sockless Jerry Simpson, William Allen White, Ed Howe, Walt Mason, Stubbs, Funston, Henry Allen, Victor Murdock, and Harry Kemp; the State of Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Mary Ellen Lease--the same sweet Mary Ellen who remarked that "Kansas ought to raise less corn and more hell!"