We were not tempted to linger in North Dakota. No shade, no variety, no charm, nothing but wheat, wheat, wheat;--ruined crops left to bake in the glaring sun. Great grain elevators, community-owned, made the only vertical lines in the landscape. The rest was flat, and to us stale and unprofitable; colorless save for the faintly rainbow-tinted Bad Lands. What little individuality the state had was crude and dreary, reeking of Townleyism. With its wheat, its per capita wealth, and its beyond-the-minute legislation I have been told it is one of the most prosperous states of the Union. It may be. I know some people like South Dakota,--virtuous, prosperous, solid, yet with no shade trees, no bosky nooks, no charm. I leave their presence as quickly as we left Dakota to the companionship of its galvanized iron elevators. We sympathized with an old man who chatted with us when one of our frequent punctures halted us in a forsaken little hamlet. In fact, it was hardly a hamlet; it was more like a hamlet with the hamlet left out. We commented on the drought. “I suppose you’re used to it?” “Me? I guess not! I don’t belong here. Where I come from they’ve got a perfect climate all year round.” “California?” we asked wearily. “Tacoma.” “But I’ve heard it’s always raining in Tacoma.” “So it does. Rains every day of the year. There’s a climate for you. Hope I get back to it some day, but,” he shook his head sadly, “I don’t know.” “Can’t you sell out?” “Don’t own anything. Just here on a visit. Came here expecting to stay a couple a weeks, and been here three years and nine months.” “That almost sounds as if you like the place.” “Naw. Came on to bury my mother-in-law, and what do you know!” His sense of grievance mounted to indignation. “She ain’t died yet!” As we talked to the aged man whose faith in human nature had been so bitterly shattered by this perfidy in a near relative, he pointed to the lad who was mending our tire. “That fellow went through the war from start to finish,” he said. “Got decorated three times.” We looked at the desolate fields and the one forlorn main street, and wondered how a hero who had known the tenseness of war and the civilized beauty of France could endure to return to the bleak stupidity of the town. “Where were you stationed in France?” we asked him. “Well, I was everywhere,--in the Argonne, at Belleau Woods and Chattoo Thierry, and all them places.” “It must have been exciting.” “Well, it was pretty hot.” “Do tell us more about it.” “Well it was pretty hot,--pretty hot.” “Did you like France?” “France?” His eyes kindled as they swept the bare prairie,--“Believe me, I was glad to get back where there’s something doing. Mud,--that’s what France was,--nothin’ but mud!” The tire he repaired gave out before evening, but we forgave him. Not every puncture can be patched by a hero of Belleau Wood. Besides, it was our twelfth that week, and one more or less had become a matter of indifference.