The excitement grew and so attracted the attention of the country that the office concluded that I must go out and see what I could make of it. I did not much want to go, not only because of my desire to free myself of the subject but because my heart was too heavy with personal loss to feel enthusiasm for any task. In the spring of 1905 my father had died after a long slow illness. To me he had always been everything that is summed up in the word “dear.” Modest, humorous, hard-working, friendly, faithful in what he conceived to be the right, he loved his family and friends and church, and asked only to serve them. His business associates held him as a man of honor and a gentleman. Father’s death for a time darkened my world. Later I began to realize that the dearness of him was to remain as a permanent thing in my life. But in 1905 this sense of continued companionship was something which came slowly out of a dark sea of loss. So it was with a heavy heart that I went to see what was happening in Kansas. First I wanted to see with my own eyes if the fields I had been hearing about were as rich as advertised; so I spent some ten days driving about southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, then just coming in with the promise of great wells. It was about as exciting a journey as I ever have made. It was on one of these trips I saw my first dust storm. Driving in a buckboard behind two spirited horses across a practically unbroken prairie, my companion suddenly looked behind him. “Jehoshaphat!” he shouted. “Wrap your head up.” I turned to see the sky from horizon to zenith filled with dark rolling clouds. It was not from fire. What was it? “A dust storm,” my companion cried. Quickly and expertly he prepared to take it. He loosened the checkreins of the horses, and the spirited animals evidently knowing what they were in for dropped their heads as low as they could hold them and leaned up against each other. We wrapped ourselves as closely as we could and, like the horses, clung to each other. The storm did not last long, but it was pretty awful while it did. The air was thick, you could not breathe. But it passed, and I was ordered to shake myself out. I found that I was almost engulfed with a fine black dust, that it was packed close to the hubs of the wheels of our buckboard. It was ten days before I got rid of that dust, for it was ten days before I had a real bath. The dust had turned the primitive water supplies into a muddy liquid quite impossible to drink and hopeless for cleansing. The wonder of it was that the real discomforts counted not at all at the time. I had joined an eager, determined, exultant procession of wildcatters and promoters, of youths looking for their chance or seeking adventure for the first time, tasting it to the full.