a situation that would pay an outsider to keep his hands off. Come back to God's country if he wanted land; come back to Kansas, where human life averaged five years longer than anywhere else, and the climate beat Italy and California so far you couldn't even see its dust.
All of which did not alter Rawlins' designs on Senator Galloway's fenced lands in the least. He had come to Dry Wood with his plans arranged, the very base of them being a homestead on some creek in that white place on the map. Exploration had revealed to him that Galloway had appropriated to his own use the best land in the Dry Wood section.
There were thousands of acres of agricultural land, watered by numerous streams, lying inside the fence not more than four miles from sheep limit. A half-section of that land belonged to him, under the semi-arid homestead provisions, his birthright as an American citizen, and he was going in there to take it.
Galloway might be a big man in the affairs of that State, but he was nothing in Rawlins' scheme. Galloway had not been there, designated and set down on the map, when that scheme was drawn. With the Government behind him to uphold and defend him in his rights, Rawlins the homesteader would be bigger than Galloway the usurper.
Galloway had put a personal affront upon him by building that fence; the injustice of it bore directly on him, the oppression was his load. His life had been shaping for a long time, in toil and hope and far-projected intention, towards that white spot on the map. The more he thought of it the hotter his resent-
