Here, everything was of necessity new and raw. Ruth in the midst of this? She knew nothing of what she was going into except that Abe was to create some sort of home for her: Ruth, whom a year or so ago he had met casually when buying oranges in a store….

Well, he would conquer this wilderness; he would change it; he would set his own seal upon it! For the moment, one hundred and sixty acres were going to be his, capable of being tilled from line to line!

He would conquer! Yet, as he looked about, he was strangely impressed with this treeless prairie under the afternoon sun. This utterly undiversified country looked flat as a table-top. Differences in level, small as they might be, must exist. Why, otherwise, should there be bare soil here and there, with the smooth and cracked surface of a dried mudhole in clay? Whereas elsewhere the greyish-green, silky prairie grass grew knee-high. Why should the spring floods which he had not yet seen drain away to the east, into the river which carried them to the great lake? Why should it have been observed by those who had preceded him that certain sections of this wilderness dried sooner in spring than others? There must be undulations in the soil.

A year ago, Abe had scanned the district from a purely utilitarian point of view. Apart from the bush land in the far north, this had been almost the last district where free land was still available. Within it he had looked for depth of topsoil, for nearness to possible neighbours, for a convenient distance from a shipping-point.

Nothing but such considerations had had any influence with him a year ago. That the general conformation of a landscape might have to be considered, such an idea he would have laughed at. Yet this prairie seemed suddenly a peculiar country, mysteriously endowed with a power of testing temper and character. But that was exactly what he had wanted: a “clear proposition” as he had expressed it, meaning a piece of land capable of being tilled from line to line, without waste areas, without rocky stretches, without deeply-cut gullies which denied his horses a foothold. He wanted land, not landscape; all the landscape he cared for he would introduce himself.

Yet, half unbeknown to him, there was a dream: of a mansion such as he had seen in Ontario, in the remnants of a colonial estate–a mansion dominating an extensive holding of land, imposed upon that holding as a sort of seigneurial sign-manual. Dominating this prairie.

Had he undertaken more than he could do?

So far he had allowed his horses to idle along the faint trail. At this thought he straightened on top of the tent which covered his household goods. There, just ahead of him, came the turn; so far he had gone north, covering four miles in that direction. Now two miles west; and then look out for the stake which marked his corner.

He shook the lines over the backs of the horses and looked up. There did not seem to be even birds about! But this immense and utter loneliness merely aroused him to protest and contradiction: he would change this prairie, would impose himself upon it, would conquer its spirit!

At last he arrived on his claim and stopped just within his lines. Before he climbed to the ground, he scanned the quarter section immediately west. On close scrutiny the monotony of the flatness proved to be broken there by what, at this distance, looked like two blisters in the soil: sod-hut and sod-stable of his neighbour; built by cutting with a spade squares of the prairie turf, matted with ancient roots, and using them like enormous flat bricks. Not thus was he going to build his first abode!

He slipped to the ground and unhooked his horses, throwing the traces over their backs; then he hitched them all four abreast and, behind them, strode over to Hall’s place.

Hall was at home: a short, fat man of forty. As he issued from the sod-shack, which had two small square windows and a plank door fitted into its shaggy wall, he betrayed no surprise.

“Well,” he said, “you got here, eh?”

“Yes,” Abe replied. “Can I water the horses?”

“Sure. Help yourself. Help yourself to anything you can find on the god-damn place.”

“Have a crop in, I suppose?”

“They’s seed in the ground; an’ it’s up. Quite a height, too.”

“How much?”

“Thirty acres. But whether it’s going to make a crop–” And the man shrugged his shoulders and flung an arm which came naked out of a sleeve ripped from the shoulder down.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Put in too doggone late. Water didn’t go till nearly June.” There the man stood, hardly raised, mentally and in his aspirations, above the level of that prairie from which he had come to wrest a living. “Truth to tell, if you want to know, if it were to do over again, I wouldn’t do it. That’s flat.”

Abe nodded. “Well, I’ll take the horses down to the pool.”

“Help yourself.