too great for that ancient method of travel, although he kept a high-stepping team and a red-wheeled buggy for town driving and short excursions in the country from his headquarters at Indian Rock, the county seat.
A railroad had been built through that country, a great trunk-line reaching out to El Paso and on to the Pacific coast. There was a station, around which a little town was growing, on Tom Simpson's ranch, and there Waco was building a tall, poured-concrete grain elevator, the walls of which were already up. It was number nine in his chain of elevators stretching across' the rich wheat belt of Southern Kansas.
On this sunny day in late June the harvest was tingeing yellow; in a week the binders would be at work, and soon the red stream of hard winter wheat would be pouring into Waco Johnson's bins. Waco was driving out with a big buyer from Kansas City, who was abroad making crop estimates and contracts. They had stopped at the margin of what seemed a sea of wheat, its distant shores invisible to the eye.
"So this is the famous Simpson ranch?" said the buyer, speaking with the satisfaction of one who had fulfilled a long desire.
"Eleven thousand acres of wheat in one patch," Waco said, nodding. "I remember when he put in a hundred and forty, and people thought he was crazy. He's the man that started the ball rollin' down here in this country—I reckon they'd been rangin' cattle over here yet, lettin' this good wheat land go to waste, if it hadn't been for that far-seein' Englishman. He made all of us down here in
