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horses from disillusioned visionaries making tracks back to well-blazed Missouri), but simply as a clan of skinny men inclined always toward itchy feet and idiocy, toward foolish roaming, toward believing in greener grass over the hill and straighter hemlocks down the trail.
    “You bet. We get to that place down the trail, then we sit back and take ’er easy.”
    “Right. We got plenty time then. . . .”
    But, always, just as soon as the old man finally got all the trees cut and the stumps cleared and the old lady finally got the linseed coating she’d been so long griping about for her hemlock floor, some gangly, frog-voiced seventeen-year-old would stand looking out the window, scratching a stringy-muscled belly, and allow, “You know . . . we can do better than this yere sticker patch we got now.”
    “Do better? Just when we finally got a toehold on ’er?”
    “I believe we can, yes.”
    “ You can do better, may-be—though I truly do have my mis-givin’s about it—but your father an’ me, we ain’t leaving!”
    “Suit yourself.”
    “No sir, Mister Antsy Pants! Your father an’ me, we come to the end of it.”
    “Then Father an’ you suit yourselfs, ’cause I’m movin’ on. You an’ the old man do what you please.”
    “ Wait a minute now, bud—”
    “Ed!”
    “Just hold your horses now, makin’ up my mind for me what I do, woman. Okay, bud, what egzackly was it you had in mind, just outta curiosity? ”
    “Ed!”
    “Woman, the boy an’ me is talkin’.”
    “Oh, Ed . . .”
    And the only ones that ever stayed behind were either too old or too sick to continue west. Too old or too sick, or, as far as the family was concerned, too dead. For when one moved, they all moved. Tobacco-scented letters found in heart-shaped candy boxes in attics are filled with excited news of this moving.
    “. . . the air out here is real good.”
    “... the kids do fine tho the school as you can well imagine this far from civilization is nothing to holler about.”
    “. . . we look to see you folks out thisaway very soon now hear?”
    Or with the dejected news of restlessness:
    “. . . Lu tells me I should not pay any attention to you that you and Ollen and the rest always put a burr in my blanket but I don’t know I tell her I don’t know. I tell her for one thing I am not as of yet ready to settle that what we got here is the whole shebang and give up that we cannot improve our situation some. So I’ll think on it . . .”
    So they moved. And if, as the years passed, some parts of the family went slower than others, moving only ten or fifteen miles during their lifetime, still the movement was always west. Some had to be dragged from tumbledown homes by insistent grandchildren. Gradually some even managed to be born and to die in the same town. Then, eventually, there came Stampers of a more sensibly practical nature; Stampers clearheaded enough to stop and stand still and look around; deep-thinking, broodful Stampers able to recognize that trait they began calling “the flaw in the family character” and to set about correcting it.
    These clearheaded men made a real effort to overcome this flaw, made a truly practical effort to put once and for all an end to this senseless fiddlefooting west, to stop, to settle down, to take root and be content with whatever portion the good Lord had allotted them. These sensible men.
    “All right now . . .” Stopping on a flat Midwestern land where they could see in all directions: “All right, I do feel we have come about far enough.” Stopping and saying, “It’s high time we put an end to this foolishness that has been prodding at our ancestors; when a man can stand here —and see in every direction and left’s no better’n right and forward’s got just as much sage and buffalo weed as backward, and over that rise yonder is just more flat, more of the same we been walkin’ over for two hundred years, then why , praise Jesus, why go further?”
    And