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Updated: May 2, 2025


The village life abounds with jokers, Shiftless, conscienceless and shrewd. Colonel Peavy had just begun the rubber with Squire Gordon, of Cerro Gordo County. They were seated in Robie's grocery, behind the rusty old cannon stove, the checkerboard spread out on their knees.

It was a populous, flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern, on the plaza of which faced the "Hotel Morelos," formerly the "Porfirio Diaz," but with that seditious name now carefully painted over. Being barely a mile above sea-level, the town has a suggestion of the tropics and the temperature of midday is distinctly noticeable.

When those owning tractors got through breaking for themselves they turned over sod for other settlers. In every direction on the Brulé and all over the plains which had been settled, teams went up and down, making a black and green checkerboard of the prairie. Ida Mary and I had Chris break and sow sixty acres of our land to flax.

By nightfall the wind was wailing eerily through the chimneys; but the checkerboard panes of light one glimpsed through the trees of the Westfall lane were bright and cheery. In the comfortable sitting room of the farmhouse, Carl rose and drew the shades, added a log to the great, open fireplace and glanced humorously at his companion who was industriously playing Canfield.

"A feller down there to Sky Top," he went on, arousing only the most indolent interest, "one of them spy-glass ingineers tenderfoot, with his six-shooter belt buckled so tight he couldn't get his feet to the ground he says to me I might as well trade my old grays for a nice new checkerboard, or a deck of author cards, for I won't have nothing to do but just amuse myself when the railroad cars gets here."

"Resurrected One, I want to know more about the karma which forces souls to return to the three worlds." I could listen forever, I thought, to my omniscient Master. Never in his earth-life had I been able at one time to assimilate so much of his wisdom. Now for the first time I was receiving a clear, definite insight into the enigmatic interspaces on the checkerboard of life and death.

If Moses had retired to a checkerboard in the grocery store or to pitching horseshoes up the alley and talking about "ther winter of fifty-four," he would have become the seventeenth mummy on the thirty-ninth row in the green pickle-jar! Imagine Moses living today amidst the din of the high school orations on "The Age of the Young Man" and the Ostler idea that you are going down hill at fifty.

"Queer doings for the dusty miller," repeated Dolan. The group by the bench heard the slap of the checkerboard on its shelf, and General Ward cut into the conversation as one who had never been out of it. "The boy's got good blood in him; it will come out some day he wasn't made a Thatcher and a Barclay and a Winthrop for nothing.

The young fellow who said this stood upon the highest point of the Ridge Road, where the land sloped abruptly to the valley in which lay the small municipality of Crawberry on the one hand, while on the other open fields and patches of woodland, in a huge green-and-brown checkerboard pattern, fell more easily to the bank of the distant river.

In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling, earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse.

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