The rainy season had now set in in good earnest all through Nebraska, and while the natives have typhoid fever and malaria to a more or less extent, yet most of them live through it, but people from the dry mountain regions that have been used to pure air and water all their lives fare worse from these fevers ten times over than the natives, and Dillbery Ike fell a victim right in the start. One evening soon after we left Grand Island I noticed his face was flushed very red, and he complained of a dull headache, but as he had the headache a good deal ever since the railroad police had scalped him at Cheyenne in mistake for a striker, I didn't think so much of his headache. But when I come to look at his tongue and feel his pulse I found every indication of high fever. In a few hours he was out of his mind and talked of shady mountain sides, babbling brooks and clear mountain springs of water, and he talked of his hosses and cattle, his cow ranch and alfalfa meadows, but most of all he talked of "Sarer." Now Dillbery had only one romance in his life that we knew of, and that happened in this way: Several decades previous to our story the few families living in the vicinity of Dillbery's ranch in Utah had got together and built an adobe school-house, and voting a special tax on the piece of railroad track that run through their part of the country had raised enough money to pay for the school-house and hire a school-teacher. At first each of the three married women in the neighborhood wanted to teach the school. Then each of them offered to take turns about teaching it so they could divide the money, but their husbands, who was the directors, wanted a school-marm, so as to have a little young female blood diffused through the atmosphere in that part of the country, and after advertising for a school teacher, the New England brand preferred, got hundreds of answers very shortly. So putting their heads together they selected one that had a kind of crab apple perfume attached to the application, and was worded in such way as to give the reader a notion of pleading blue eyes, with a wealth of golden brown hair and heaving bosom, not too young to teach school nor too old to be romantic and sympathetic, and closed a deal with her to come West and teach their school. She had signed her name Sarah Jessica Virginia Smythe, but was always known as Miss Sarer. When she was about to arrive at the railroad station, thirty miles away, all the married men wanted to go and meet her. All of them had particular business in at the station that day, but none of their wives would stand for it. They said that Dillbery Ike was a bachelor and the proper one to get her. [Illustration: _The Arrival of Miss "Sarer."_]