"That's true; and it's just what I'm counting on. That's what made me leave old Dakota. I want to be in on the ground-floor!"
Harding knit his brows, and his face had a concentrated look. He was not given to talking at large, but he had a gift of half-instinctive prevision as well as practical, constructive ability, and just then he felt strangely moved. It seemed to him that he heard in the distance the march of a great army of new home-builders, moving forward slowly and cautiously as yet. He was one of the advance skirmishers, though the first scouts had already pushed on and vanished across the skyline into the virgin West.
"Well," he said, "think what's happening! Ontario's settled and busy with manufactures; Manitoba and the Dakotas, except for the sand-belts, are filling up. The older States are crowded, and somebody owns all the soil that's worth working in the Middle West. England and Germany are overflowing, and we have roughly seven hundred miles of country here that needs people. They must come. The pressure behind will force them."
"But think what that will mean to the price of wheat! It's bringing only a dollar and a half now. We can't raise it at a dollar."
"It will break the careless," Harding said, "but dollar wheat will come. The branch railroads will follow the homesteads; you'll see the elevators dotting the prairie, and when we've opened up this great tableland between the American border and the frozen line, the wheat will pour into every settlement faster than the cars can haul it out. Prices will fall until every slack farmer has mortgaged all he owns."
"Then what good will it do? If the result is to be only mortgages?"
"Oh, but I said every slack farmer. It will clear out the incompetent, improve our methods. The ox-team and the grass trail will have to go. We'll have steam gang-plows and graded roads. We'll have better machines all round."
"And afterward?"
Harding's eyes sparkled.
"Afterward? Then the men with brains and grit who have held on—the fittest, who have survived—will come into such prosperity as few farmers have ever had. America, with her population leaping up, will have less and less wheat to ship; England will steadily call for more; we'll have wheat at a price that will pay us well before we're through. Then there'll be no more dug-outs and log-shacks, but fine brick homesteads, with all the farms fenced and mechanical transport on the roads. It's coming, Fred! Those who live through the struggle will certainly see it."