"How far is it to a railroad?" Jack asked.
"Plumb down that road allowance, thirty-two miles, straight as the crow flies, when it ain't Sittin'," he threw in with a little snicker.
"Thirty-two miles!" Jack exclaimed. "Pretty well in the wilderness, isn't it?"
"Wilderness nothin'! This is suburban prop'rty. This is close in. I take some of 'em back sixty an' seventy an' eighty miles. Thirty-two miles is jus' right, an' I'll tell you why. When a new railroad comes its likely to come about thirty miles from the other; that's about a sensible distance apart. An' here you are, in the middle of the right-of-way, an' may be cuttin' your homestead into town lots; ten lots to an acre an' two hundred dollars a lot. Can you beat it? The Lord sure has been good to you, fer no special reason that I can notice. 'Tain't your good looks"—we were badly sun-blistered, in spite of the axle-grease—"an' 'tain't your good sense, excep' in selectin' me as your financial advisor, so to speak. I reckon it's all account o' those girls—sisters, you said."
Jake threw a querying stress on the word sisters, but it was against all nature to be offended at him. Had we resented his remark he would have laughed our seriousness out of court. But we decided to see some of the adjoining sections.
Sixteen appealed to Jack. We could have taken the west half, and so, working together, we would have had a mile furrow. The gully also touched sixteen, and would have given us the same advantages as Jake claimed for the sections he had recommended. However, we found him very fixed in his preference for Fourteen and Twenty-two, and finally we accepted his arguments, and set out to make a more detailed survey of the land. The gully angled between the two quarters, taking scarce an acre off either of them. A jolly stream, brown with the grass of its banks, gurgled along its bed.
I knelt down to try the water; there was the taste of snow, but there was also the harder, sharper note of spring water mingled with it.
"Runnin' water like that is worth a thousand dollars on any man's farm," Jake declared. "An' come up this way. Wait till I show you somethin'."
The "something" proved to be a widening in the valley, where was a considerable growth of small willows and poplars. "Fence posts and fire wood," said Jake, "an' on railroad land too, that won't be sold fer years. You'll have 'em all cut down before then. That timber's worth another thousand, or half that, anyway."
I thought of the great pine back on the old farm in Ontario, and the "timber" looked to me like gads and switches. None of it was tall enough to reach out of the little valley and show a green tip to the bald surface of the prairies. But we were not in Ontario now; we were in a land where even a three-inch tree was not to be despised.