“I don’t quite think you would ever guess, Colonel.  Cherokee Strip.”

“My land!”

“Sure as you live.”

“You can’t mean it.  Actually living out there?”

“Well, yes, if a body may call it that; though it’s a pretty strong term for ’dobies and jackass rabbits, boiled beans and slap-jacks, depression, withered hopes, poverty in all its varieties—­”

“Louise out there?”

“Yes, and the children.”

“Out there now?”

“Yes, I couldn’t afford to bring them with me.”

“Oh, I see,—­you had to come—­claim against the government.  Make yourself perfectly easy—­I’ll take care of that.”

“But it isn’t a claim against the government.”

“No?  Want to be postmaster?  That’s all right.  Leave it to me.  I’ll fix it.”

“But it isn’t postmaster—­you’re all astray yet.”

“Well, good gracious, Washington, why don’t you come out and tell me what it is?  What, do you want to be so reserved and distrustful with an old friend like me, for?  Don’t you reckon I can keep a se—­”

“There’s no secret about it—­you merely don’t give me a chance to—­”

“Now look here, old friend, I know the human race; and I know that when a man comes to Washington, I don’t care if it’s from heaven, let alone Cherokee-Strip, it’s because he wants something.  And I know that as a rule he’s not going to get it; that he’ll stay and try—­for another thing and won’t get that; the same luck with the next and the next and the next; and keeps on till he strikes bottom, and is too poor and ashamed to go back, even to Cherokee Strip; and at last his heart breaks—­and they take up a collection and bury him.  There—­don’t interrupt me, I know what I’m talking about.  Happy and prosperous in the Far West wasn’t I?  You know that.  Principal citizen of Hawkeye, looked up to by everybody, kind of an autocrat, actually a kind of an autocrat, Washington.  Well, nothing would do but I must go Minister to St. James, the Governor and everybody insisting, you know, and so at last I consented—­no getting out of it, had to do it, so here I came.  A day too late, Washington.  Think of that—­what little things change the world’s history—­yes, sir, the place had been filled.  Well, there I was, you see.  I offered to compromise and go to Paris.  The President was very sorry and all that, but that place, you see, didn’t belong to the West, so there I was again.  There was no help for it, so I had to stoop a little—­we all reach the day some time or other when we’ve got to do that, Washington, and it’s not a bad thing for us, either, take it by and large and all around —­I had to stoop a little and offer to take Constantinople.  Washington, consider this—­for it’s perfectly true—­within a month I asked for China; within another month I begged for Japan; one year later I was away down, down, down, supplicating with tears and anguish for the bottom office in the gift of the government of the United States—­Flint-Picker in the cellars of the War Department.  And by George I didn’t get it.”