The scene
was characteristically, wonderfully beautiful. It was about five
o'clock in a day in late June, and the level plain was green and
yellow, and infinite in reach as a sea; the lowering sun was casting
over its distant swells a faint impalpable mist, through which the
breaking teams on the neighboring claims plowed noiselessly, as
figures in a dream. The whistle of gophers, the faint, wailing,
fluttering cry of the falling plover, the whir of the swift-winged
prairie pigeon, or the quack of a lonely duck, came through the
shimmering air. The lark's infrequent whistle, piercingly sweet,
broke from the longer grass m the swales nearby. No other climate,
sky, plain, could produce the same unnamable weird charm. No
tree to wave, no grass to rustle; scarcely a sound of domestic life;
only the faint melancholy soughing of the wind in the short grass,
and the voices of the wild things of the prairie.
Seagraves, an impressionable young man (junior editor of the
Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat
rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the
second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet
grown restless under its monotony.
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