Of writing he knew little and the art of composition appeared very difficult. But of thought, this he had a plenty. Well, after all that was the most essential. If one has thoughts to express, it is possible to learn very soon some method of construction. So after some weeks of speculation, he bought himself a tablet, some pencils and took up the art of writing.

He found no difficulty in saying something. The first day he wrote ten thousand words. The next day he reversed the tablet and wrote ten thousand more. In the next two days he re-wrote the twenty thousand, and on the fifth day he tore it into shreds and threw it to the winds.

He had raised a little wheat and when the foreclosures had been completed and the wheat had been threshed he sowed a large portion of the seed back into the ground on three hundred acres of ground upon which the crop that year had failed. According to the law of the state, when a foreclosure is completed, the party of the first part may redeem the land within one year from the date of the foreclosure. Or, better still, he may pay the interest, and taxes at the end of one year from the date of the foreclosure, and have still another year in which to redeem the land. So it is to be seen that if Jean Baptiste could pay his interest and taxes one year from this time, he would have two years in all to redeem his lost fortunes. Hence, in seeding a large acreage of wheat, he hoped for the best. The years, however, had been too adverse to now expect any returns when a crop was sown and it had been merely good fortune that he happened to secure the means with which to sow another, for credit there was for few any more.

When this was done, there was nothing to do but listen to the wind that blew dry still, although the protracted drought had been broken by light autumn rains. So took he up his pencil and fell to the task of writing again. Through the beautiful, windy autumn days, he labored at his difficult task, the task of telling a story. The greatest difficulty he encountered was that he thought faster than he could write. Therefore he often broke off right in the middle of a sentence to relate an incident that would occur to him to tell of something else. But at last he had written something that could be termed a story. He took what appeared to him to be quite sufficient for a book to a friend who had voiced an interest in his undertaking. In fact, although he had said nothing about it, the news had spread that he was writing a story of the country and everybody became curious.