Although the scenes I passed through were very like others, there being nothing of marked interest to the traveller in this section of Indiana, I still found much pleasure in looking over the farms as I passed them and noticing the variety of methods and effects.
A good stimulating breeze came inland from the lake and by noon it had added zest to my appetite. I stopped for dinner at the village of Chesterton and then pushed on to this place which was reached in the evening by seven o'clock—twenty-eight miles having been covered during the day.
The only accommodation to be found was nothing more nor less than a beer-saloon with sleeping rooms attached, a characteristic, I regret to say, which I observed in many of the small towns through this section of the country. As immediate environment has an influence in making impressions, my opinion of this halting-place on the borders of "Hoosierdom" was not the most exalted.
One hundred and Twenty-ninth Day.
Rohmer House,
Richton, Illinois,
September Seventeenth.
Owing to the late hour of my arrival at Hobart the previous evening I was unable to observe my usual practice of looking through the place and making a note of its striking points in my journal, and for this reason I was not in the saddle until ten o'clock A. M., although the time was spent more in seeing than in chronicling what was seen.
Paul was still in the happiest of spirits and I rode away from Hobart at a gallop, stirring the dust of this sleepy little village as it had possibly not been stirred for many moons. The cheerful fact was made clear to me before leaving that I was as far from Joliet at Hobart as I had supposed myself to be at Michigan City.
In the course of the day, in which twenty-eight miles were again covered, Centralia, Sherryville and Dyer were passed, these towns being on Grand Prairie, across which I rode from morning till night. At four o'clock I reached the boundary between Indiana and Illinois, realizing that at this point six States had added their rich scenes and splendid enterprises to my memory.
As I was moving along on the prairie just before dark my ears caught the sound of a peculiar barking and soon a pack of what I supposed to be dogs were following me. I noticed that Paul's manner changed and he appeared disturbed, but attributed this to the barking and the persistent keeping at his heels of the little animals. To a man whom I met later, I explained that I had been followed for some hours by a pack of dogs, when he promptly informed me that they were doubtless prairie wolves. Of course to an Easterner this news gave an added interest to Grand Prairie.
