HOW IT BEGAN Ding-ding-ding-ding--Ding-ding-ding-ding--went the bell of the railway telegraph--Ding-ding-ding-ding---- Tom Gardner looked up from his work and leaned his ax against the wall of the low tin-roofed shanty which represented both his home and the station Swallowtown on the Oregon Railway. "Nine o'clock already," he mumbled, and refilling his pipe from a greasy paper-bag, he lighted it and puffed out clouds of bluish smoke into the clear air of the hot May morning. Then he looked at the position of the sun and verified the fact that his nickel watch had stopped again. The shaky little house hung like a chance knot in an endless wire in the middle of the glittering double row of rails that stretched from east to west across the flowery prairie. It looked like a ridiculous freak in the midst of the wide desert, for nowhere, so far as the eye could reach, was it possible to discover a plausible excuse for the washed-out inscription "Swallowtown" on the old box-lid which was nailed up over the door. Only a broad band of golden-yellow flowers crossing the tracks not far from the shanty and disappearing in the distance in both directions showed where heavy cart-wheels and horses' hoofs had torn up the ground. By following this curious yellow track, which testified to the existence of human intercourse even in the great lonely prairie, in a southerly direction, one could notice about a mile from the station a slight rising of the ground covered with low shrubs and a tangled mass of thistles and creepers: This was Swallowtown No. 1, the spot where once upon a time a dozen people or more, thrown together by chance, had founded a homestead, but whose traces had been utterly obliterated since. The little waves of the great national migration to this virgin soil had after a few years washed everything away and had carried the inhabitants of the huts with them on their backs several miles farther south, where by another mere chance they had located on the banks of the river. The only permanent sign of this ebb and flow was the tin-roofed shanty near the tracks of the Oregon Railway, and the proud name of Swallowtown, fast disappearing under the ravages of storm and rain, on the box-lid over Tom Gardner's door.