About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with which I instantly closed. For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner. That was the last long stop before I reached Denver. And now, as I am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver. A thousand miles remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them! I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural development of events the determining of my westward journey. Whichever course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other than the monotonous daily round of work. There will be mining regions with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many lonely mountain-trails to be followed. It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent. It varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a burning thirst--even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.