It seemed that with the death of Jim Lloyd, who had protected the land, luck left the region. The previous year, 1923, had been a disaster for dry-land farmers, for only six inches of rain had fallen, which meant that even the best fields produced only about two bushels of wheat an acre, not enough to pay for the plowing, and land-poor men like Earl Grebe now found they had barely enough money to pay their store bills.
In 1924 things were no better, for even though nine inches of rain did fall, the drought of the preceding year showed its effects, and the good fields produced slightly under four bushels an acre.
A sense of defeat spread through the area, for if such conditions continued, many farmers would be driven out of business. They would not produce enough to make interest payments on their mortgages, and banks would foreclose. For the lack of a few dollars of ready cash, a man stood to lose a farm worth many thousands. It was a crazy system, one devised by idiots and administered by bankers, but it was the way America was run, and the individual farmer could do nothing about it.
Now the dreadful word mortgage struck at the heart of the Grebe family. In the good years, when money was plentiful, they had bought a half-section from Mervin Wendell and had considered themselves clever in talking him into accepting a thousand-dollar mortgage at five percent per annum.
“It’s like finding money,” Earl had explained enthusiastically. With four hundred acres planted to wheat which sold at two dollars a bushel, the Grebes had a gold mine, and when the cash came in they had built what the brochure called “their mansion.” They had also paid off their mortgage, but as soon as this was done Mervin Wendell came by with the good news that he could sell them an adjoining 320 acres. He also extended them the courtesy of another thousand-dollar mortgage, but when the papers were drawn he did not restrict it to the land he had just sold; he applied the mortgage to the entire farm.
Now, in the bad years, they owed Mervin Wendell’s son Philip one thousand dollars at a time when there were simply no dollars in circulation, and certainly none coming their way. The interest was only fifty dollars a year; if they continued to pay that, nothing bad could happen to them; they did not have to reduce the principal. But pay the interest they must, even though the debt had been contracted when dollars were plentiful and was coming due when they were rare.
“It’s so unfair,” Alice Grebe told her family as they gathered to discuss the threat which hung over their home. “He switched the mortgage from the land, which we could give back if we had to, onto the house, which is our very life blood. Earl, you must do something about this.”
He visited Philip Wendell in his offices near the railroad station and explained the error. “Your father must have meant to put the mortgage on the land,” he said, but the new head of Wendell Ranches and Estates proved adamant, polite but adamant.
“I’m quite sure, Mr. Grebe, that my father never made such a careless mistake. Times being unfavorable, you look back upon the event in a way which best supports your interests. I’m sure rain is coming back to these parts, and all you have to do is pay off the mortgage, and this unpleasantness will be forgotten.”
That night Earl Grebe assembled his family and spoke to them in harsh, grave words. His wife Alice was thirty-five years old that autumn and seemed prepared for whatever trials might lie ahead. She was still a tense woman and her energy had not flagged. Their son Ethan, an intelligent boy who duplicated many of the virtues of Mrs. Wharton’s hero, was twelve years old and eager to work. Their daughter Victoria was a tall, quiet girl like her mother, but their son Tim, two years old, was a boisterous little fellow. He sat on his mother’s lap as the discussion began.
“He means to take this farm from us,” Grebe said. “I could see it in his eye. In everything he did.”
“Was he so harsh?” Alice asked.
“He’s already foreclosed on three farms, Alice, and he intends making us the fourth.”
“He wouldn’t transfer the mortgage to the land?”
“He looked me in the eye, never blinking, and said he was sure his father never made such a mistake.”
“We should have had a lawyer,” Alice said, biting her lip to keep from whimpering.
“I did not think you required a lawyer when dealing with an honest man.” He was sweating, and Alice said, “Victoria, make us some lemonade.”
“Sit still! There will be no more lemonade. This family is going to eat grass if necessary, but we’re going to accumulate that thousand dollars and pay him off. Our life depends on it. Alice, you start. Tell us right now how you can save money.”
“Oh, dear!” she said falteringly. For some time now she had been conducting her home as frugally as possible. She was about to say that no further savings could be effected, but then she saw her husband’s stern visage, the goodness of his character shining through, and she knew that she must do even more.
So she began to enumerate the little things that could be done: “We’ll buy no clothes for anyone. No toys for Christmas. No candy. We’ll eat a lot of mush, the way we did in the soddy. And we don’t need curtains or brooms or anything like that. I’d feel happier, Earl, if you gave me no money at all, because I do grow careless. You buy the things and handle the accounts.”
Each of the two older children stated what he or she would surrender, and when Earl’s turn came he said harshly, “I’ll sell the two bay horses ...”
“Oh, no!” his wife protested “They’re the heart of the farm.”
“I must sell them,” he said
The prospect of Earl’s selling the two bays was more than Alice could face, and she broke into tears, dropping her head onto the table and shuddering as she had done years ago. Her shoulders contracted for some moments, and Earl said to Victoria, “Comfort her,” and he continued with his account of what expenditures he would eliminate. When he finished, his wife said weakly, “Earl, for God’s sake, don’t sell the horses. We don’t have to give at church. Victoria can ...”
“We will all bear down, Alice. We will pay back this unjust debt. The fault is mine, but we must all share it.”
So the Grebes went onto a regimen so spartan that only their neighbors who were in similar straits could comprehend. They were encouraged by two unexpected events. Vesta and Magnes Volkema, who had never allowed a mortgage on anything they owned, came voluntarily, and Vesta said, “We have some savings. If that miserable bastard tries to sheriff you out for the mortgage money, we’ll pay your interest.”
“I’m glad to see you’re cutting back expenses, Earl,” Magnes said. “If we get any rain at all, you’ll get out from under.”
The other appreciated visitor was Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey. At his own expense he was visiting the dry-land acres hit hardest by the two-year drought, and he was not even close to surrender. At the school auditorium he said in his low, powerful voice, “Don’t lose heart! Don’t listen to the ranchers when they gloat ‘We told you so.’ Never in the history of this state have we had three bad years in a row. Men! Look at the statistics! In region after region across this nation two bad years have always been followed by five good ones. Look at the facts!”
He became his old evangelical self as he scribbled the reassuring figures on a board. Montana, two bad years followed by six good ones. North Dakota, two very bad years followed by five excellent ones. Utah, where they kept careful records, the same. “Five years from now,” he promised them, “I’ll be lecturing somewhere in Kansas, and I’ll write on the blackboard, ‘Colorado, two bad years in 1923-24, followed by five excellent ones.’ It’s the law of nature.”
He visited Earl Grebe’s farm, making numerous borings with the earth auger, and he proved that down deep a residue of moisture existed. “This soil is ready for snow, Earl. You have your surface well prepared to accept it. For God’s sake, when it comes, disk it at once and trap the moisture in here. You’ve a great farm, Earl, and you’ll see thirty-bushel wheat again. On that I give you my solemn promise.”
And two days after he left, snow came, and then more snow, and then more, until it was clear that the drought had ended. Vesta Volkema, who was becoming quite rowdy as she grew older, told the Grebes during a family dinner, “Our little bastard Creevey warned God to get off his ass and get some snow moving,” but before the two families started to eat, Alice Grebe asked if she might open the meal with grace, and the other five bowed their heads as she began, “Dear Lord, from the depths of our hearts we thank ...” She could go no further, for she fell into a fit of weeping and Vesta had to take her from the room for a while.
The moisture came and the crops were saved, but in the late spring of 1925 something happened which went unnoticed by everyone in town except Walter Bellamy, who was now the town postmaster, the land commissioner’s office having had to close down. It was in May, on a cold, blustery day such as spring often brought to Colorado, and he was looking toward the mountains when he noticed an unusually heavy gust of wind sweep eastward across the prairie. It came from such a direction that its path lay along furrowed fields, with never a windbreak or a strip of unplowed land to temper its force, and as it moved, it began to catch up from the earth small grains of soil and collections of tumbleweeds and shreds of Russian thistle which had come in with the Turkey Red, and as it whipped through Line Camp, Bellamy thought that if such winds became frequent, especially during years with little snow, they might do real damage.
Increasingly apprehensive, Bellamy convened a meeting of the district farmers and invited an expert from the Agricultural College in Fort Collins to explain how they might protect their fields from either wind or rushing summer rains by plowing a different pattern, but fifteen inches of rain had already fallen this year, with more expected, so no one paid much attention to what the professor said. Bellamy did insist, however, that the new tenant who was farming the land he had acquired east of Line Camp start to plow in the new way, and although they grumbled at “fancy-pants ideas of men who never farmed,” they did agree to plow along the contours, but since there was neither wind nor flood, they accomplished nothing, and in the fall of 1925 Bellamy saw to his disgust that they had reverted to long, straight furrows, uphill and down. Any force left in his argument vanished that October when his tenant won the plowing contest with a set of the straightest, evenest furrows a judge ever saw.
On December 31 Earl Grebe had the satisfaction of carrying seven hundred dollars in cash into the office of Philip Wendell. “That leaves only three hundred dollars on the mortgage,” he said with a certain grimness.
“I told you last year we’d get rain,” Wendell said evenly. “Next year looks just as good.”
“If it is, we’ll burn the mortgage.”
“I’m sure you will,” Philip said. “My father had great respect for you and Alice.”
Why the Grebes and families like them now fought to stay on the land was a mystery. They could see that Line Camp had reached its peak and was beginning to die. In 1924 the local newspaper had folded, and even in the good year of 1925 two major businesses closed down. The tall white grain elevator stood half empty and the railroad which was supposed to have reached the town went into bankruptcy without laying a yard of track.
Alice Grebe, who had done so much to make the town habitable, was among the first to realize it was doomed, and twice she begged her husband to pull up stakes now, sell out and move to California. But men like Grebe could not bring themselves to admit defeat. “Look, Alice!” he pleaded. “I own more than a thousand acres. We have this good house. When things turn around ...”
Alice suspected they might never turn around. For reasons she could not have explained she saw that prairie towns such as Line Camp must become vacated ghosts populated only by gusts of wind, yet she was powerless to act. “We’ll make the best of it,” she said with little hope, for she saw that the Grebes and the Volkemas had, through vanity and hope, locked themselves onto a land that was dying and to a town that was vanishing. At the end of 1925 two more stores shut down, and the population fell below one hundred.
Imprisonment at Line Camp proved especially bitter to Vesta Volkema, who watched her vision of California vanish in dust. Once at the Grebes’ she came close to tears, confessing, “Magnes was right that time when he wanted to sell our damned acres for twenty-five cents each. Hell, we’d have been better off it we’d given them away.”
“You still could,” Alice said excitedly. “We all could: Just give them away and get out.”
“No,” Magnes said. “You get trapped on the land. It reaches out and holds you.”
Then, as though to test the courage of the immigrants, the years 1926 and 1927 turned even more brutal, and farm income dropped so low that sometimes it seemed as if the Grebes would starve on the rich land they owned. For two long years they went to not one picture show in Greeley, nor to any church supper, for they were too poor to contribute a covered dish. They were paupers, worse off than the meanest family in Little Mexico, and Alice sometimes wondered if the providential years they had known when they first broke the sod would ever return.
Yet even during these painful years her love for her husband increased, and she bore him two more children, a third son and a second daughter, and the burden of providing them with a reasonable start in life fell solely upon her. She went days without food to ensure their getting the nourishment they required. She dressed them well, too, making over the clothes which had been worn by their brothers and sisters. She did much sewing, often working until her eyes were heavy, and she spent hours playing with the youngest three in the old soddy, telling them of former days and of how the family had worked together.
Her only consolation was the church, and it was a powerful support. Sometimes when the minister brought in a speaker from the college at Greeley, and Earl was too dead-tired to attend, she would walk by herself along the back path to Line Camp, and ask pertinent questions, and then return home alone, carrying only a small flashlight. Occasionally Mr. Bellamy arranged meetings, like the one in which an actress from Denver reported on the New York plays, and on the very special one, The Great God Brown, in which she had played a role. By popular demand, she recited some of the scenes from that play, a bright, lovely young woman, and Alice thought how proper it would be if Mr. Bellamy were to marry such a girl.
And then in 1928 everything conspired to help the Grebes: there was ample rain, much snow and a warm spring. Earl made an astonishing forty bushels to the acre, and it sold at $1.32 a bushel. The mortgage was paid off and every Grebe child received a new outfit, with Ethan, now sixteen, getting his first long trousers.
One evening that autumn, the Volkemas and the Larsens came over to dinner, and after the meat was taken away but before the dessert was brought in by Victoria, Earl Grebe cleared his throat, rose and asked his wife to produce the bottle of champagne. When the glasses were filled he asked Ethan to bring in a bucket, and when it was placed before him on the table, he brought from his pocket the mortgage paper and a box of matches.
“The Grebe family has been through a dangerous time,” Earl said. “We might have lost our farm except for the support our neighbors gave us, but all that’s past.” Striking a match, he held the flame to the bottom edge of the mortgage, and everyone at the table watched with fascination as the dangerous paper burned.
When it was ashes, Alice Grebe lifted her glass and said, “From here on out ... only good times ... for all of us.

Early spring on the great plains is the most hellish season known in the United States. Wet snow falls and for days the thermometer growls atng beneath the moose heads: “Forgive me for letting myself in, but I had to see you, Paul.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment, he blurted, “Have you sold those Hereford bulls?”
“Why?”
“I want to buy them.”
“I told the foreman to get rid of them.”
“Has he sold them?”
“We can find out soon enough.”
Skimmerhorn listened apprehensively as Garrett rang the foreman: “How about those thirty bulls I told you to sell? ... A man in Kansas is trying to make up his mind ... Did you make a promise of any kind to him? ... It doesn’t have to be writing ... You gave him an option? ... Till when? ... He was supposed to make up his mind yesterday and he didn’t bother to call? ... Ring him right now and tell him we sold them to Skimmerhorn in Colorado.” He replaced the phone and told Skimmerhorn, “They’re yours. And I’m delighted they’ll be staying close to home where I can watch them.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
“I thought you’d switched to Charolais.”
“I did. Got the results they said I’d get, too. Bigger calves. More money. With your Simmentals you’ll do the same. Those fancy boys don’t lie.”
“Then why the eagerness to buy my Herefords?”
“Well,” the young rancher said with a touch of sarcasm, “they tell the truth but they’re not obligated to tell the whole truth. Look at my figures.” And from his pocket he produced a folded sheet which summarized the fuller story: Hereford cow—Charolais bull. Calves so big they could only be born by Caesarean section, fifteen percent. Calves so big they had to be born with the help of calf-puller, nineteen percent. Calves dead at birth or shortly thereafter, fourteen percent.
“What it means,” Skimmerhorn said, “is that you do get extra money when you sell your steers, but you waste it all on veterinary fees. So I figure, if I’m working extra hard just to pay the vet, why not run cattle I really like?” He accepted the drink Garrett proffered and slumped into one of the chairs beneath the moose heads. Twirling his glass, he confessed, “I’ve done very well with the Charolais. No complaints, and I’m going to keep some of those big bulls ... to tighten up my herd, you might say. But when I haul your thirty Hereford bulls over to my ranch, and then pick up some good white-face cows at the Nebraska sales, well ... I’ll feel I’m an honest man again.”
“I can drink to that,” Garrett said.

On the last day of November, Paul Garrett was wakened early by a cowboy shouting. “The Simmentals are here!”
There, waiting by the barn. were cattle trucks which had hauled the thirty red-and-white bulls nonstop from Montana. At first Garrett wanted no part of introducing them to their new home. for this was Hereford country and they were trespassers, but then he felt ashamed of himself. “If we’re experimenting with Simmentals, we’ll do it right,” he said to me, and he went down to assist with the unloading.
The new bulls were big, full-bodied, and they looked as if they could care for themselves, but they were flabby, more like dairy cows than range Herefords. One of the hands cried softly, “Moo cow, moo!” But then he saw the boss and scurried off.
“Pete!” Garrett called. “Come back here. They may look moo-cow, but they’ll be paying your wages. Show them respect.”
So the Simmentals were unloaded, and Garrett could see that Tim Grebe had sent him thirty strong bulls. They’d do well on Crown Vee land, and maybe the balance sheet would look better in a year or two. But when the animals moved out to take possession of land which for a century had reverberated to the hoof-beats of Herefords, Garrett felt sick to his stomach, and that afternoon he went in to Centennial alone, to drink at the bar of the Railway Arms. Next year it, too, would be gone.
And as he drank he grew increasingly mournful over the fate of Centennial. It had known a hundred good years and now was perishing. The sugar-beet factory, the feed lots, the Hereford ranches—all the old patterns of life were dissolving.
He banged his glass on the table and grabbed at a stranger. “This was a good town, a great one,” Garrett shouted at him. “Do you know that Edwin Booth played in our theater, and Sarah Bernhardt? William Jennings Bryan stopped here, and so did James Russell Conwell and Aristide Briand.” The man was obviously unfamiliar with these names, and pulled away.
A freight train, one of the few that still came through town, sounded its querulous whistle, evoking a new set of memories. Garrett left his table and went over to the stranger, saying compulsively, “Listen to that, pardner. That’s the Union Pacific. I remember the day, thirty-four years ago this month, when Morgan Wendell ... he’ll take office in January ...”
His phrases dribbled off, but not his memories. He left the bar and went out onto the veranda, and cold air reminded him of that distant time. Morgan Wendell had come to the ranch and said, “Let’s go down and see it today!” and they had hitchhiked their way to a point along the Platte some miles east of Centennial. There they waited along the shore, two boys twelve years old skipping stones across the water, watching the hawks.
Then Morgan had looked at his birthday watch and said, “It’ll be pulling out of La Salle about now,” and they left the river and stationed themselves as close to the railroad tracks as possible.
In the west they heard the purring of a giant cat, the swift movement of some immense creature across the prairie. It was like nothing they had heard before, a singing rush of air. and Morgan called, “Paul! Here it comes!”
It was the City of Denver, that majestic gold-and-silver streamliner that left Denver each afternoon at four-fifteen, speeding almost nonstop to Chicago. It bore down upon them, its mighty engines humming. It had been built without a single protrusion—a sleek, perfect thing. Its thirty cars could not be differentiated, for flexible doors enclosed what in former days had been open space between them. This humming. lovely thing moved as a unit, swift and unbelievably quiet.
“Oh!” Morgan whispered as it bore down upon him, ninety miles an hour, a flashing drift of gold on its way to Chicago. He sighed as the last car leaped onward, vanishing in the distance.
It was the finest train that had ever run, a marvel of grace and utility. But it had dominated the prairie only briefly. It was the most civilized form of travel thus far devised, but after less than three decades its elegance was no longer appreciated and now it gathered rust.
Garrett stared across the silent tracks and saw, on the far side of the Platte, automobiles whizzing by in one unbroken chain, filled with men and women who had left Omaha that morning and who would sleep in Denver that night, ghosts of the Interstate, most of them zombies who set their speed at ninety and ignored all of America except the big cities, where tonight’s motel was totally indistinguishable from last night’s.
“Look at the stupid bastards,” he said to no one. “They haven’t even seen Grand Island, where the rivers join, or Ogalalla, where the cowboys rioted, or Julesburg, where a third of a million emigrants swam the Platte ...” He stayed for some minutes watching the unceasing flight down the Interstate. Soon the drivers would be safe in Denver, and each year that city would grow larger, uglier and less congenial.
“Those bastards would be afraid to detour for an hour at Line Camp.” he mused. “Afraid to see American history staring at them.” And he knew that with the continuing exodus, one day soon Centennial would become the next ghost town. Kicking at the rotting boards of the veranda, he said gloomily. “Well we’ve had a good hundred years. Perhaps another hundred years from now people with sense will start coming back to these towns.”
About nine that night Cisco Calendar was told by friends that Paul Garrett was sloppy drunk in the Railway Arms, so he called me and we took charge. We led Garrett unsteadily to Flor de Méjico, where we forced him to eat a chili-size—toasted bun, hamburger with onions, all smothered in hot chili beans and covered with melted cheese—after which Garrett sobered a little and asked Cisco to sing “Buffalo Skinner.”
“Don’t have my guitar,” Cisco said.
“Get the damned thing.” Garrett said, and a boy was sent to fetch it. Then the diners quietened as Cisco sang of Jacksboro, Texas, in the spring of 1873. He sang many other songs, so aching with the memory of the west that Garrett lowered his head on the table, lest his neighbors see his reddened eyes.
After a while Cisco put the guitar aside and told Garrett, “I know how you feel, Paul. I could live anywhere in America ... anywhere in the world, I suppose. All I need is my guitar and a Sears Roebuck catalogue for buyin’ a new pair of jeans now and then. But I keep livin’ in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why?
“A man needs roots. Specially a singin’ man tryin’ to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin’ for. When he walks down the street it’s got to be his street. The rootless guys I sing about are interestin’ only if they’ve lost one place and are lookin’ for another. Like they say, Paul, a man springs from the soil but he don’t spring far.
“I live in Centennial because at night, when I’m through workin’ I can jump into my pickup and be up in the Rockies inside of an hour—pitch my tent in Blue Valley up beyond the crud, beside a real stream of water, and wake up with trees in my eyes, and maybe in the high country an elk starin’ at me. Paul, that’s somethin’—that is truly somethin’.
“But what I like even better, I head the pickup east and in fifteen minutes I’m lost on the prairie with nothin’, absolutely nothin’, visible to the horizon except maybe a jet airplane thirty thousand feet high streamin’ from New York to L.A. I pitch my tent the way men been doin’ out there for ten thousand years. And when you do that you are alone ... Man, are you alone! And somethin’ seeps into your soul you simply can’t pick up in Chicago or Dallas.
“I live in Centennial because it’s maybe the best spot in America ... could even be the best remainin’ spot on earth.”
“Could be,” Garrett said. “It damn well could be.”

THE END.

About the Author
JAMES A. MICHENER was born in New York City in 1907. He was graduated summa cum laude from Swarthmore College and did research work at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, Harvard, the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and the University of Siena (Italy). He taught at the George School (Pa.), Colorado State College, and Harvard. Mr. Michener skyrocketed to fame with his first book, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, which won the Pulitzer Prize and became the basis of the musical, “South Pacific.”