They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"
"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.
"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"
This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very well,—but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her own folks."
"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.
In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York, well pleased with my plan.
After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now the day of reckoning had come.