Rain, sun, wind! The elements rule over Kansas. People's hearts are light or heavy according to the weather and the prospects as to crops. My Kansan friend in the observation car pointed out to me the fact that at every railroad siding the railroad company had paid its respects to the Kansas wind by the installation of a device known as a "derailer," the purpose of which is to prevent cars from rolling or blowing from a siding out onto the main line. If a car starts to blow along the siding, the derailer catches it before it reaches the switch, and throws one truck off the track. "I suppose you've seen cyclones out here, too?" I asked the Kansan. "Oh, yes," he said. "Do the people out in this section of the State all have cyclone cellars?" "Oh, some," he said. "Some has 'em. But a great many folks don't pay no attention to cyclones." Last year, during a bad drought in western Kansas, the wind performed a new feat, adding another item to Kansas tradition. A high wind came in February and continued until June, actually blowing away a large portion of the top-soil of Thomas County, denuding a tract of land fifteen by twenty miles in extent. It was not a mere surface blow, either. In many places two feet of soil would be carried away; roads were obliterated, houses stood like dreary, deserted little forts, the earth piled up breast high around their wire-enclosed dooryards, and fences fell because the supporting soil was blown away from the posts. During this time the air was full of dust, and after it was over the country had reverted to desert--a desert not of sand, but of dust. This story sounded so improbable that I looked up a man who had been in Thomas County at the time. He told me about it in detail. "I have spent most of my life in the Middle West," he said, "but that exhibition was a revelation to me of the power of the wind. A quarter of the county was stripped bare. The farmers had, for the most part, moved out of the district because they couldn't keep the wheat in the ground long enough to raise a crop. But they were camped around the edges, making common cause against the wind. You couldn't find a man among them, either, who would admit that he was beaten. The kind of men who are beaten by things like that couldn't stand the racket in western Kansas. The fellows out there are the most outrageously optimistic folks I ever saw. They will stand in the wind, eating the dirt that blows into their mouths, and telling you what good soil it is--they don't mean good to eat, either--and if you give them a kind word they are up in arms in a minute trying to sell you some of the cursed country. "The men I talked to attributed the trouble to too much harrowing; they said the surface soil was scratched so fine that it simply wouldn't hold. There were wild theories, too, of meteorological disturbances, but I think those were mostly evolved in the brains of Sunday editors.