Jake braced himself on his short, stout legs, and made a gesture that might have been interpreted as a belligerent attitude. He ended it by flapping his arms in imitation of flying, and emitting a series of caws. Jack was duly suppressed. "Let's get to business," he said. "Explain this soil. Will it grow anything, and if so, what?" "Let's find a badger-hole," said Jake, and we had little trouble in locating one. "Now look at this. This hole goes down five, six, seven feet, maybe more, in the ground. Look what his nibs has kicked out. Fine, loamy, sandy soil, not too light an' not too sticky, all the way down. That goes plumb to Kingdom Come. Course, the top is a little darker, on account o' the grass roots, but it's all soil. None o' yer down-east three inches-o'-muck-an'-a-rock-bottom to that." Jake took a fresh chew of tobacco and looked out over the greenish-brown prairie. It certainly was a picture to kindle the imagination. Almost as level as a floor, one could have seen a jack-rabbit jump anywhere within a mile. The little gully was quite lost in the vista; you would not dream of its existence until you came right upon it. In no direction was there a sign of life, but far on the horizon a whiff of smoke hung like a fading pennant in the still sky. "I have it figgered out like this," Jake continued, "an' my figgers is right; this land is worth more than any gold mine between hell an' Whoop-up. When you take the gold out o' a mine you ain't got nothin' left, but you can take gold out o' this mine next year, an' the year after, an' the year after, fer ever an' ever, an' there's still as much there as when you started--if you farm it right." Our inspection satisfied us in every particular. Jake explained, as we already knew, that we would have to build separate shacks on the two quarters, to comply with the law about sleeping on the land claimed. "But you can build one stable in the gully fer the live stock," he added; "the Gov'ment don' care where _they_ sleep, jus' so's the homesteader himself is sufficiently oncomfort'ble." We smiled over his interpretation of regulations which, as we knew, were necessary to prevent the wholesale blanketing of the free lands by people who had no intention of living on them. "Now we better pick a second an' a third choice, jus' in case some one slips in ahead o' us on this," said Jake, and we spent the afternoon driving about and making fresh locations. Much of the land was already taken up, Jake told us, and although there were as yet no signs of settlement we would see a great change by fall. Jack spoke of the disadvantage of the alternate sections of railroad land, which were not given away free, but which had to be bought. "They are an obstacle to close settlement," he said, "and I guess loneliness is about the worst thing there is to contend with on these prairies."