So, this trip, I stopped to make sure. It was a
beautiful town of six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a
high-girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden with trees at the
station. A company of joyous men and women, whom that air and that
light, and their own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came along
in motors, and gave us such a day as never was.
'What about the Luck?' I asked.
'Heavens!' said one. 'Haven't you heard about our natural gas - the
greatest natural gas in the world? Oh, come and see!'
I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines and machinery-shops,
worked by natural gas which comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of
fried onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by valves and
taps is reduced to four pounds. There was Luck enough to make a
metropolis. Imagine a city's heating and light - to say nothing of
power - laid on at no greater expense than that of piping!
'Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?' I demanded.
'Who knows? We're only at the beginning. We'll show you a brick-making
plant, out on the prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show you
one of our pet farms.'
Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please,
and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the
Mounted Police, who had done a year at the (Boer) war, told us how the
ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about
South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers by the
wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing along which we rushed.
(The Prairie has nothing to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or
tricky gates.)
'After all,' said the Major, 'there's no country to touch this. I've had
thirty years of it - from one end to the other.'
Then they pointed out all the quarters of the horizon - say, fifty miles
wherever you turned - and gave them names.
The show farmer had taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped
through his gates and reached the silent, spick-and-span house, with its
trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled in the sun
between two mounds of golden chaff. Every one thumbed a sample of it and
passed judgment - it must have been worth a few hundred golden sovereigns
as it lay, out on the veldt - and we sat around, on the farm machinery,
and, in the hush that a shut-up house always imposes, we seemed to hear
the lavish earth getting ready for new harvests.
