“My boy,” said he, “I’ve actually located your two south corners, and you can run the south line yourself from these stakes.  The north line is three hundred and twenty rods north of and parallel to it—­and the east and west lines will run themselves when you locate the north corners—­but I’ll have to wait till the ground freezes, or get Darius Green to help me—­and the great tide of immigration hain’t brought him to this neck of the woods yet.”

“But where’s my land?” I queried:  for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies in 1855.  “Where’s my land?”

“The heft of it,” said he, “is right down there in Hell Slew.  It’s all pretty wet; but I think you’ve got the wettest part of it; the best duck ponds, and the biggest muskrat-houses.  This slew is the only blot in the ’scutcheon of this pearl of counties, Mr. Vandemark—­the only blot; and you’ve got the blackest of it.”

I leaned back against the buggy, completely unnerved.  Magnus put out his hand as if to grasp mine, but I did not take it.  There went through my head that rhyme of Jackway’s that he hiccoughed out as he drank with his cronies—­on my money—­that day last winter back in Madison:  “Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!” This huge marsh was what John Rucker, after killing my mother, had deeded me for my inheritance!

In that last word I had from her, the poor stained letter she left in the apple-tree—­perhaps it was her tears, and not the rain that had stained it so—­she had said:  “I am going very far away, and if you ever see this, keep it always, and whenever you see it remember that I would always have died willingly for you, and that I am going to build up for you a fortune which will give you a better life than I have lived.”  And this was the fortune which she had built up for me!  I hated myself for having been gulled—­it seemed as if I had allowed my mother to be cheated more than myself.  Good land, I thought, was selling in Monterey County for two dollars an acre.  The next summer when I bought an eighty across the road so as to have more plow-land, I paid three dollars and a half an acre, and sorrowed over it afterward:  for in 1857 I could have got all I wanted of the best land—­if I had had the money, which I had not—­at a dollar and a quarter.  At the going price then, in 1855, this section of land, if it had been good land, would have been worth only twelve or thirteen hundred dollars.  At that rate, what was this swamp worth?  Nothing!

I can still feel sorry for that poor boy, myself, green as grass, and without a friend in the world to whom he could go for advice, halted in his one-sided battle with the world, out there on the bare prairie, looking out on what he thought was the scene of his ruin, and thinking that every man’s hand had been against him, and would always be.  Where were now all my dreams of fat cattle, sleek horses, waddling hogs, and the fine house in which I had had