that the sight of it gave him a sinking feeling in that particular of his anatomy he always thought of as his craw.
He stood on the station platform, his matting suitcase with imitation leather corners between his feet, feeling as if the shell had been taken off and left him exposed, nothing to hide his greenness, his insufficiency, from the sneering scrutiny of that bold land. If there was a hand-hold for a man in that stripped-off, bald-headed country it would take shrewder eyes than his to find it, he was sadly and down-heartedly sure.
Bill had come out to that roof of his native state, the very apex of the earth, it seemed to him, following the beguiling lure of romance and the advice of Dutch Gus, who was not a Dutchman, but a Swede. While everybody knew that Dutch Gus was a Swede, nobody ever would take this country for a part of Kansas. It was a deceit that no amount of explanation could cover, it appeared to Bill. It certainly must have got on the map through misrepresentations.
Back in Johnson County, where Bill was born, it wasn't that kind of a country. A man could see a natural tree back there. Trees had been Bill's principal business in life for a good many years, accounting for his first thought in comparison of advantages between the place he had left and the land in which he had arrived.
For eight years Bill had been actively engaged with trees in Schoonover's nursery, enlarging his education, which could stand a good deal of it without trespassing on anybody, by putting in three months at a business
