This was the first breech-loader I had ever seen, and I looked it over with a buying eye. It didn't seem to me that it would be much better for hunting than the old-fashioned rifle, loaded with powder and a molded bullet rammed down with a patch of oiled cloth around it; for after you have shot at your game once, you either have hit it, or it runs or flies away. If you have hit it, you can generally get it, and if it goes away, you have time to reload. Besides those big cartridges must be costly, I thought, and said so to Mr. Dunlap. "When you're hunting Border Ruffians," said he, "a little expense don't count one way or the other; and you may be willing to pay dear for a chance to reload three or four times while the other man is ramming home a new charge. Give me the new guns, the new ideas, and the old doctrine of freedom to fight for. Don't you see?" "Why, of course," said I, "I'm for freedom. That's why I'm going out on the prairies." "Prairies!" said old Evans. "Prairies! What do you expect to do on the prairies?" "Farm," I answered. "All these folks that are rushing to the prairies," said the old man, "will starve out and come back. God makes trees grow to show men where the good land is. I read history, and there's no country that's good for anything, except where men have cut the trees, niggered off the logs, grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it--and if there are stones, it's all the better. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' said God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready for the plow, you are trying to dodge God's curse on our first parents. You won't prosper. It stands to reason that any land that is good will grow trees." "Some of this farm was prairie," put in Preston, "and I don't see but it's just as good as the rest." "It was all openings," replied Evans. "The trees was here once, and got killed by the fires, or somehow. It was all woods once." "You cut down trees to make land grow grass," said Thatcher. "I should think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground." "Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the prairies?" asked Dunlap. "You fly in the face of God's decree, and run against His manifest warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans. "You'll see!"