Clayton was not over thirty-two, therefore my father’s junior by some years.  How well had they known each other?  We went to dinner together.  We were served with bacon and greens, strong coffee, apple pie.  It was all very rough and strange.  But Clayton told me many things.  He knew the lawyer Brooks who had written me.  Brooks was a reliable man.  But when I pressed Clayton for details about my father he grew strangely reticent.  I began to feel depressed, overcome by a foreboding of wonder.

After dinner we separated.  Clayton had errands to do preparatory to leaving and I went forth to see the town.  What a spectacle of undulating board sidewalks built over swales of sand, running from hillock to hillock!  What shacks used for stores, trading offices, marts for real estate!  Truly it was a place as if built in a night, relieved but little by buildings of a more substantial sort....  Drinking saloons were everywhere.  I heard music and entered one of these resorts.  There was a barroom in front and a dancing room in the rear.  The place was filled with sailors, steamboat captains and pilots, traders, roisterers, clerks, hackmen, and undescribed characters.  Women mingled with the men and drank with them.  They dressed with conspicuous abandon, in loud colors.  Their faces were rouged.  They ran in and out of the dance room with escorts or without, stood at the bar for drinks, entwined their arms with those of the men.  In the dance room a band was playing.  A man with a tambourine added to the hilarity of the music.  It was a wild spectacle, unlike anything I had ever seen.  No one accosted me.  I could feel a different spirit in the crowd from that I had seen on the boats or in New York.  There was no talk of politics, negroes, force bills.  They did not seem to know or to care about these things.  It was a wild assemblage, but without meanness or malice.  They were occupied solely with a spirit of carnival, of dancing, drinking, of talk about the arrival of the Illinois; about the price of land and the great future of Chicago.  “It’s as plain as day,” said a man at the bar.  “Here we are at the foot of the lake.  The trade comes our way.  The steamboats come here from the East.  Look at the country!  No such farm country in the world!  Why, in twenty years this town will have a population of 20,000 people.  It’s bound to.”  How could it be?  How could such a locality ever be the seat of a city?  So far from the East.  And nothing here but wastes of sand!

I left the place unnoticed and returned to the hotel.  I sat down drearily enough.  The feeling that I was far from home, far even from the civilization and the charm of New York came over me with depressing effect.  I began to wish that Clayton would appear.  I had not decided to accept his kindly offer.  I must be off to-morrow.  The air seemed oppressive.  Was it so warm?  I put my hand to my brow.  It was hot.  Perhaps I was not well.  The trip I had just ended was after all wearisome.  I had not slept well some nights.  I sensed that I was fatigued.  What would a ride of more than 200 miles on a pony do to me?  But on the other hand I had the alternative of 90 miles by stage.  For the first time I began to feel apprehension about the days ahead.