They woke up in the prairie country of North Dakota—or, rather, Spider did. He was sleeping in the upper berth, of course, so Joe could have all the air possible, and he climbed down as quietly as he could and went into the observation car to see where they were. It was bright sunlight, almost as it would be at home at eight o’clock, yet his watch told him it was only a little after four. He looked out of the window on a strange land—on the prairies about which he had read all his life and never seen before. He had been disappointed in the Mississippi River, but there was no disappointment here. They were more wonderful than he had ever dreamed—just one endless green sea of growing wheat stretching to the horizon, without a hill or a valley, as flat as the floor of the ocean. Indeed, they looked like a green ocean, with the small houses, the big red barns and silos, the little groves of trees behind the barns for a windbreak, rising like islands every mile or so. The whole world here seemed to be grain. Everything was under cultivation, there were no trees at all except the groves planted beside the farmhouses, mile after mile as far as the eye could see to the far horizon rolled the sea of young wheat, or else the golden stubble where the winter crop had been harvested.
For the first time, Tom understood what men mean when they speak of “the great wheat fields of the West,” for the first time he realized the bigness of America. He wanted to go wake Joe at once, and if Joe hadn’t been sick, he certainly would have done so. As it was, he let him sleep till six, and then he couldn’t stand it any longer, and shook him awake.
“Joe! we’re on the prairie!” he cried.
All that day, mile after mile, they traveled through the wheat, with never a break in the vast monotony of the level land, the endless procession of houses and barns far off, like islands in the green sea. The sun did not set till late, and even at nine o’clock they could read on the back platform of the observation car, as the prairie turned dusky, and in the west the lingering sunset was like a sunset over the sea.
“My, it’s been a wonderful day!” Joe sighed, as they went to bed. “I feel as if I’d just been soaked in bigness. I guess the Rockies aren’t any bigger than these prairies. But what gets me, though, is how the kids here go sliding in winter.”
A man on the platform beside them laughed.
“Say, I never saw a toboggan till I went East after I was twenty-one years old,” he said. “But I’ve seen some drifts that were twenty feet high, and that’s quite a hill for us.”
The next morning Tom again was the first awake, and he hurried out to see the prairie once more—but there was no prairie. The world looked exactly as if there had come a great wind or earthquake in the night and kicked the calm prairie sea up into waves. There were still no trees, only a great expanse of grayish grass and wild flowers, but you couldn’t see far from the train in any direction, because the land was so cut up with the billows, little rounded hills and earth waves maybe fifty feet high. This was the cattle country now, and every little while a rough log cabin and log stables, half dug out of the side of a bank, would appear beside the track, and there would be cattle and horses grazing over the slopes. Again Spider waked Joe, and they watched for a cowboy, but none appeared.
As they were eating an early breakfast, the train seemed to be running into more level prairie country again, though it never settled back into the really flat prairies. Presently they stopped at a little town, with a single street of low wooden and brick stores and houses, and no trees, and the two scouts got out to stretch their legs. The first thing they saw as they alighted was a cowboy! Clad in a flannel shirt, with big black fur chaps down his legs and a wide-brimmed felt hat mysteriously sticking on his head, he came dashing up about a mile a minute, kicking up a tremendous dust, and pulling his horse down with a quick sweep that stopped him exactly against the platform. The boys were so interested in him that it was not till they were getting aboard again, at the conductor’s shout, that Joe looked to the west, and cried, “Spider, quick! Look there!”
Tom followed his finger, and, lo! there they were, the Rocky Mountains! As far to the north, as far to the south, as the eye could see stretched the great, blue procession of towering peaks, dazzling white with great patches of snow on summits and shoulders, and seemingly only a few miles away.