The dinner hour found Dan Failing in the public library of Gitcheapolis, asking the girl who sat behind the desk if he might look at maps of Oregon. He got out the whole question without coughing once, but in spite of it she felt that he ought to be asking for California or Arizona maps, rather than Oregon. People did not usually go to Oregon to rid themselves of his malady. A librarian, as a rule, is a wonderfully well-informed person; but her mental picture of Oregon was simply one large rainstorm. She remembered that she used to believe that Oregon people actually grew webs between their toes, and the place was thus known as the Webfoot State. She didn't know that Oregon has almost as many climates as the whole of nature has in stock,--snow in the east, rain in the north, winds in the west, and sunshine in the south, with all the grades between. There are certain sections where in midwinter all hunters who do not particularly care to sink over their heads in the level snow walk exclusively on snowshoes. There are others, not one hundred miles distant, where any kind of snowstorm is as rare a phenomenon as the seventeen-year locusts. Distances are rather vasty in the West. For instance, the map that Dan Failing looked at did not seem much larger than the map, say, of Maryland. Figures showed, however, that at least two counties of Oregon were each as large as the whole area of the former State. He remembered that his grandfather had lived in Southern Oregon. He looked along the bottom of his map and discovered a whole empire, ranging from gigantic sage plains to the east to dense forests along the Pacific Ocean. Those sage flats, by the way, contain not only sage hens as thick as poultry in a hen-yard and jack rabbits of a particularly long-legged and hardy breed, but also America's one species of antelope. Had Dan known that this was true, had he only been aware that these antelope are without exception the fastest-running creatures upon the face of the earth, he might have been tempted to go there instead of to the land of his fathers. But all he saw on the map was a large brown space marked at exceedingly long intervals with the name of a fort or town. He began to search for Linkville.