The child's fear of financial disaster was eased by the prospect of "goin' East." The "East" was the fairyland of her dreams, the childhood's home of her father, who was a good story-teller when he was not irritated, the Mecca and Medina of all the pilgrimages of all their little world. To go East was to be a travelled person, to attain distinction, just the next best thing in fact to being made President of the United States. To go East was to live near the timber, where one could wander for hours, days, ages, in the cool freshness of its shady paths. The sunburned child, with her jug hanging by a strap from the saddle horn, had a swift, rapturous vision of alluring, mossy banks, canopied by rustling leaves, before she was called back to the stern hills of her native Kansas and the sterner necessity of forcing a hundred head of maddened cattle to keep within the confines of an illy defined road. By the time they had ridden ahead and crowded the cattle down to the right of way again, the child's natural good sense and business instincts had combined to temporarily shatter the dream. "Nobody 'd buy us out if there ain't nothing to feed the cattle," she said, watching the boy's face eagerly in the hope that he would reassure her. When he did not speak, she added, with discouraged conviction, "Pa wouldn't sell out anyhow; ma's been trying to get him to for a year." "He'll have to. You won't be able t' stay if there's nothin' t' feed," the lad said with emphasis, and then added with a giggle, "I bet th' Cranes is mad for bein' in such a hurry t' get in. They paid pap th' money last night, an' made 'im promise t' give possession 'fore t'morrow night. Three hundred dollars! Th' old woman took it out of 'er stockin'."