When Hans Wyker had seen his own town wane as Careyville waxed, he consigned the newer community, and all that it was, to all the purgatories ever organized and some yet to be created.

Wykerton was at a standstill now. The big brewery had become a flouring mill, but it was idle most of the time. The windows served as targets for the sons of the men who consumed its brewing product in other days, and the whole structure had a disconsolate, dismantled appearance.

There was neither a schoolhouse nor a church inside the corporation limits. The land along Big Wolf was not like the rich prairies west of it, and freeholds entered first with hopes in Wykerton's prosperity had proved disappointing, if not disastrous, to their owners.

The rough ground, mortgaged now, and by the decline of the town, decreased in value, began to fall into the hands of John Jacobs, who made no effort at settlement, but turned it to grazing purposes. His holdings joined the property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot's distress signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.

It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly deep in places.

One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs' ranches together.

"You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me," Asher was saying. "I may try sheep myself next year."

"I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That's a good horse you ride," Jacobs replied.

"Yes, he has a strain of Kentucky blue-blood. My wife owned a thoroughbred when we came West. We keep the descent still. We've never been without a black horse in the stable since that time. Do we turn here?"

They were following the lower trail by the willows, when Jacobs turned abruptly to a rough roadway leading up a shadowy hollow.

"Yes. It's an ugly climb, but much shorter to the sheep range and the cattle are near."

"How much land have you here, Jacobs?" Asher asked.

"From Little Wolf to the corporation line of Wykerton. Five hundred acres, more or less; all fenced, too," Jacobs added. "This creek divides Wyker's ground from mine. All the rest is measured by links and chains. We agreed to metes and bounds for this because it averages the same, anyhow, and I'd like a stream between Wyker and myself in addition to a barbed wire fence. It gives more space, at least."

They had followed the rough way only a short distance when Asher, who was nearest the creek, halted. The bank was steep and several feet above the water.

"Does anybody else keep sheep around here?" he inquired.

"Not here," John Jacobs answered.

"Look over there. Isn't that a sheep?"

Asher pointed to a carcass lying half out of the water on a pile of drift where the stream was narrow, but too deep for fording.

"Maybe some dog killed it and the carcass got into the creek. My sheep can't get to the water because my pasture is fenced. That's on Wyker's side, anyhow. I won't risk fording to get over there. It's as dead right now as it will ever be," Jacobs asserted.

Their trail grew narrower and more secluded, winding up a steep hill between high banks. Half way up, where the road made a sharp turn, a break in the side next to the creek opened a rough way down to the water. As they neared this, a woman coming down the hill caught sight of the two horsemen around the bend, and made a swift movement toward this opening in the bank, as if to clamber down from their sight. She was not quick enough, however, and when she found she had been seen, she waited by the roadside until the men had passed on.

Asher, who was next to her, looked keenly at her as he bade her good morning, but John Jacobs merely lifted his hat without giving her more than a glance.

The woman stared at both, but made no response to their greetings. She was plainly dressed, with a black scarf tied over her tow-colored hair. She had a short club in one hand and a big battered tin can in the other, which she seemed anxious to conceal. When the men had passed, she looked after them with an ugly expression of malice in her little pale gray eyes.

"That's a bad face," Asher said, when they were out of her hearing. "I wonder why she tried to hide that old salt can."

"How do you know it was a salt can?" Jacobs asked.

"Because it is exactly like a salt can I saw at Pryor Gaines' old cabin, and because some salt fell out as she tipped it over," Asher replied.

"You have an eye for details," Jacobs returned. "That was Gretchen Gimpke, Hans Wyker's girl. She married his bartender, and is raising a family of little bartenders back in the hilly country there, while Gimpke helps Hans run a perfectly respectable tavern in town."

"Well, I may misjudge her, but if I had any interest near here, I should want her to keep on her own side of the creek," Asher declared.

And somehow both remembered the dead sheep down in the deep pool at the foot of the hill.

The live sheep were crowding along the fence on the creek side of the big range when the two men entered it.

"What ails the flock?" Asher asked, as they saw it following the fence line eagerly.

"Let's ride across and meet them," Jacobs suggested.

The creek side was rough with many little dips and draws hiding the boundary line in places. The men rode quietly toward the flock by the shortest way. As they faced a hollow deepening to a draw toward the creek, Asher suddenly halted.

"Look at that!" he cried, pointing toward the fence.

John Jacobs looked and saw where the ground was lowest that the barbed wires had been dragged out of place, leaving an opening big enough for two or more sheep to crowd through at a time. As they neared this point, Asher said:

"It's a pretty clear case, Jacobs. See that line of salt running up the bare ground, and here is an opening. The flock is coming down on that line. They will have a chance to drink after taking their salt."

John Jacobs slid from his horse, and giving the rein to Asher, he climbed through the hole in the fence and hastily examined the ground beyond it.

"It's a friendly act on somebody's part," he said grimly. "The creek cuts a deep hole under the bank here. There's a pile of salt right at the edge. Somebody has sprinkled a line of it clear over the hill to toll the flock out where they will scramble for it and tumble over into that deep water. All they need to do is to swim down to the next shallow place and wade out. The pool may be full of them now, waiting their turn to go. Sheep are polite in deep water; they never rush ahead."

"They swim well, too, especially if they happen to fall into the water just before shearing time when their wool is long," Asher said ironically.

"What did you say Gretchen Gimpke had in that tin can?" Jacobs inquired blandly.

"Oil of sassafras, I think," Asher responded, as he tied the horses and helped to mend the weakened fence.

"Nobody prospers long after such tricks. I'll not lose sleep over lost sheep," John Jacobs declared. "Let's hunt up the cattle and forget this, and the woman and the scary little twist in the creek trail."



"Why scary?" Asher asked. "Are you so afraid of women? No wonder you are a bachelor."

Jacobs did not smile as he said:

"Once when I was a child I read a story of a man being killed at just such an out-of-the-way place. Every time I go up that crooked, lonesome hill road, I remember the picture in the book. It always makes me think of that story."

When the fence was made secure, the two rode away to look after the cattle. And if a Shadow rode beside them, it was mercifully unseen, and in nowise dimming to the clear light of the spring day.

It was high noon when they reached Wykerton, where Hans Wyker still fed the traveling public, although the flourishing hotel where Virginia Aydelot first met John Jacobs had disappeared. The eating-place behind the general store room was divided into two parts, a blind partition wall cutting off a narrow section across the farther end. Ordinary diners went through the store into the dining room and were supplied from the long kitchen running parallel with this room.

There were some guests, however, who entered the farther room by a rear door and were likewise supplied from the kitchen on the side. But as there was no opening between the two rooms, many who ate at Wyker's never knew of the narrow room beyond their own eating-place and of the two entrances into the kitchen covering the side of each room. Of course, the prime reason for such an arrangement lay in Wyker's willingness to evade the law and supply customers with contraband drinks. But the infraction of one law is a breach in the wall through which many lawless elements may crowd. The place became, by natural selection, the council chamber of the lawless, and many an evil deed was plotted therein.

"How would you like to keep a store in a place like this, Jacobs?" Asher Aydelot asked, as the two men waited for their meal.

"I had the chance once. I turned it down. How would you like to keep a tavern in such a place?" Jacobs returned.

"I turned down a bigger tavern than this once to be a farmer. I have never regretted it," Asher replied.

"The Sunflower Ranch has always interested me. How long have you had it?" Jacobs asked.

"Since 1869. I was the first man on Grass River. Shirley came soon afterward," Asher said.

"And your ranches are typical of you, too," John Jacobs said thoughtfully. "How much do you own now?"

"Six quarters," Asher replied. "I've added piece by piece. Mortgaged one quarter to buy another. There's a good deal of it under mortgage now."

"You seem to know what's ahead pretty well," Jacobs remarked.

"I know what's in the prairie soil pretty well. I know that crops will fail sometimes and boom sometimes, and I know if I live I mean to own three times what I have now; that I'll have a grove a mile square on it, and a lake in the middle, and a farmhouse of colonial style up on the swell where we are living now and that neither John Jacobs nor the First National Bank of Careyville will hold any mortgage on it." Asher's face was bright with anticipation.

"You are a dreamer, Aydelot."

"No, Jim Shirley's a dreamer," Asher insisted. "Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home the first night she came a bride to our little one-roomed soddy. There are cottonwoods and elms and locust trees shading our house now where there was only a bunch of sunflowers then, and except for Jim's little corn patch and mine, not a furrow turned in the Grass River Valley. We have accomplished something since then. Why not the whole thing?"

"You have reason for your faith, I admit. But you are right, Shirley is a dreamer. What's the matter with him?"

"An artistic temperament, more heart than head, a neglected home life in his boyhood, and a fight for health to do his work. He'll die mortgaged, but he has helped so many other fellows to lift theirs, I envy Jim's 'abundant entrance' by and by. But now he dreams of a thousand things and realizes none. Poor fellow! His dooryard is a picture, while the weeds sometimes choke his garden."

"Yes, he'll die mortgaged. He's never paid me interest nor principal on my little loan, yet I'd increase it tomorrow if he asked me to do it," John Jacobs declared.

"You are a blood-sucking Shylock, sure enough," Asher said with a smile. "I wish Jim would take advantage of you and quit his talking about the boom and his dreams of what it might do for him."

"How soon will you be platting your Sunflower Ranch into town lots for the new town that I hear is to be started down your way?" John Jacobs inquired.

"Town lots do not appeal to me, Jacobs," Asher replied. "I'm a slow-growing Buckeye, I'll admit, but I can't see anything but mushrooms in these towns out West where there is no farming community about them. I've waited and worked a good while; I'm willing to work and wait a while longer. Some of my dreams have come true. I'll hold to my first position, even if I don't get rich so fast."

"You are level-headed," Jacobs assured him. "You notice I have not turned an acre in on this boom. Why? I'm a citizen of Kansas. And while I like to increase my property, you know my sect bears that reputation—"Jacobs never blushed for his Jewish origin—"I want to keep on living somewhere. Why not here? Why do the other fellows out of their goods, as we Jews are always accused of doing, if it leaves me no customer to buy? I want farmers around my town, not speculators who work a field from hand to hand, but leave it vacant at last. It makes your merchant rich today but bankrupt in a dead town tomorrow. I'm a merchant by calling."

"Horace Greeley said thirty years ago that the twin curses of Kansas were the land agent and the one-horse politician," Asher observed.

"You are a grub, Aydelot. You have no ambition at all. Why, I've heard your name mentioned favorably several times for the legislature next winter," Jacobs insisted jokingly.

"Which reminds me of that rhyme of Hosea Bigelow:

If you're arter folks o' gumption You've a darned long row to hoe.

"I'm not an office seeker," Asher replied.

"Do I understand you won't sell lots off that ranch of yours to start a new town, and you won't run for the legislature when you're dead sure to be elected. May I ask how you propose to put in the fall after wheat harvest?" Jacobs asked, with a twinkle in his black eyes.

"I propose to break ground for wheat again, and to experiment with alfalfa, the new hay product, and to take care of that Aydelot grove and build the Aydelot lake in the middle of it. And I'll be supplying the wheat market and banking checks for hay one of these years when your town starters will be hunting clerkships in your dry goods emporium, and your farmers, who imagine themselves each a Cincinnatus called to office, will be asking for appointment as deputy county assessor or courthouse custodian. Few things can so unfit a Kansas fellow for the real business of life as a term in the lower house of the Kansas legislature. If you are a merchant, I'm a farmer, and we will both be booming the state when these present-day boomers are gone back East to wife's folks, blaming Kansas for their hard luck. Now, mark my words. But to change the subject," Asher said smiling, "I thought we should have company for dinner. I saw Darley Champers and another fellow head in here before us. Darley is in clover now, planning to charter a town for every other section on Grass River. Did you know the man who was with him?"

"That's one fly-by-night calling himself Thomas Smith. Innocent name and easy to lose if you don't want it. Not like Gimpke or Aydelot, now. He's from Wilmington, Delaware—maybe."

"You seem to doubt his genuineness," Asher remarked.

"I don't believe he will assay well," Jacobs agreed. "I've doubted him since the day he landed in Carey's Crossing fifteen years ago. Inside of an hour and a half I caught him and Champers in a consultation so secret they fastened newspapers across the window to keep from being seen."

"Where were you meanwhile?"

"Up on the roof, fixing the sign the wind had blown loose. When they saw me through the uncovered upper pane, they shaded that, too. I've little interest in a man like that."

"Does he come here often?" Asher inquired.

"He's here and away, but he never sets foot in Careyville. My guess is that he's a part of the 'Co.' of 'Champers and Co.' and that Hans Wyker is the rest of it. Also that in what they can get by fair means, each of the trio reserves the right to act alone and independently of the other two, but when it comes to a cut-throat game, they combine as readily as hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen; and, combined, they have the same effect on a proposition that sulphuric acid has on litmus paper. But this is all only a Jew's guess, of course. For myself, I have business with only one of the three, Wyker. He doesn't like my sheep, evidently, because he knows I keep track of his whisky selling in this town and keep the law forever hanging over him. But I've sworn under high heaven to fight that curse to humanity wherever I find it threatening, and under high heaven I'll do it, too."

Jacobs' face was the face of a resolute man with whom law was law. Then the two talked of other things as they finished their meal.

John Jacobs was city bred, a merchant by instinct, a Jew in religion, and a strictly honest and exacting business man. Asher Aydelot had been a country boy and was by choice a farmer. He was a Protestant of the Methodist persuasion. It must have been his business integrity that first attracted Jacobs to him. Jacobs was a timid man, and no one else in Kansas, not even Doctor Carey, understood him or appreciated him quite as keenly as Asher Aydelot did.



CHAPTER XII

THE FAT YEARS

"The lean years have passed, and I approve of these fat ones." "Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work." —The Light That Failed.

John Jacobs little realized how true was his estimate of the firm of "Champers & Co." Nor did he suspect that at this very minute the firm was in council in the small room beyond the partition wall—the "blind tiger" of the Wyker eating-house.

"I tell you it's our chance," Darley Champers was declaring emphatically. "You mustn't hold back your capital now. This firm isn't organized to promote health nor Sunday Schools nor some other fellow's fortune. We are together for yours truly, every one of us. If you two have some other games back of your own pocketbooks, they don't cut any against this common purpose. I'm for business for Darley Champers. That's why I'm here. I've got no love for Doc Carey, ruling men's minds like they was all putty, and him a putty knife to shape 'em finer yet. And another fellow I'd like to put down so hard he'll never get over it is that straight-up-and-down farmer, Asher Aydelot of the Sunflower Ranch, who walks like a military captain, and works like a hired man, and is so danged independent he don't give a damn for no man's opinion of him. If it hadn't been for him we'd a had the whole Grass River Valley now to speculate on. I'm something of a danged fool, but I knowed this boom was comin'. I felt it in my craw."

"So you always said, Champers," Thomas Smith broke in, "but it's been a century coming. And look at the capital I've sunk. If you'd worked that deal through, time of the drouth in seventy-four, we'd be in clover and no Careyville and no Aydelots in the way. I could have saved Asher's little bank stock then, too."

"You could?" Darley Champers stared at the speaker.

"Yes, if he'd given up right that first trip of yours down there. When he refused I knew his breed too well. He's as set and slow and stubborn as his old dad ever was. That's what ailed those two, they were too near alike; and you'll never catch Asher Aydelot bending to our plans now. I warn you."

"Well, but about this bank account?" Champers queried.

"Oh, the fates played the devil with everything in two weeks. Doc Carey got in with Miss Jane Aydelot down at Philadelphia, and she came straight to Cloverdale, and, womanlike, made things so hot there I had to let loose of everything at once or lose everything I had saved for myself. Serves her right, for Asher's pile went into the dump, although there's naturally no love lost between the two. But this Miss Jane is Aydelot clear through. She's so honest and darned set you can't budge her. But she's a timid woman and so she's safe if you keep out of her range. She won't chase you far, but she's got fourteen rattles and a button."

"Well, well, let her rattle, and get to pusiness," Hans Wyker demanded. "Here's Champers says he's here yust for pusiness and he wants to get Aydelot and Carey, too."

"Gentlemen!" Champers struck the table with his fist. "Let's play fair now, so's not to spoil each other's games. I'll fix Aydelot if it's in me to do it, just because he's stood in my way once too often. But he's my side line, him and Carey is. I'm here for business. Tell me what you are here for."

Hans Wyker's little eyes were red with pent-up anger and malice as he burst out:

"Shentlemen, you know my hart luck. You see where I be today. I not repeat no tiresome history here. Kansas yust boomin'! Wykerton dead! Yon Yacob own all der groun' right oop to der corporation line on tree side, an' he not sell one inch for attitions to dis town. He say dere notings to keep town goin' in two, tree year. What we care? We be rich by den an' let it go to der devil. But he not sell. Den I go mit you and we organize town company. We mark townsite, we make Grass River sell to us. We boom! boom! boom! We knock Careyville from de prairie alretty, mak' Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati where he belong mit his Chews. He damned queer Chew, but he Chew all de same all right, all right. I want to down Yon Yacob, an' I do it if it take tree hundred fifty years. I'll kill him if he get in my way. I hate him. He run me off my saloon in ol' Carey Crossin'; my prewery goin' smash mit der damned prohibittery law; he growin' rich in Careyville, an' me!"

His voice rose to a shriek and he stamped his foot in rage.

"Hold your noise, Wyker!" Champers growled. "Don't you know who's on the other side of that partition?"

"I built that partition mineself. It's von dead noise-breaker," Wyker began. But Champers broke in:

"It's your turn, Smith."

Dr. Carey had described Smith once as rather small, with close-set dark eyes and a stiff, half-paralyzed right arm and wrist, a man who wrote in a cramped left-handed style. There was a crooked little scar cutting across his forehead now above the left eye that promised to stay there for life. He had a way of evading a direct gaze, suggesting timidity. And when Hans Wyker had threatened to kill John Jacobs he shivered a little, and for the instant a gray pallor crept across his face, unnoted by his companions.

"We propose to start a town in the Grass River country that will kill Careyville. We two put up the capital. You do the buying and selling. We'll handle real estate lively for a few months. We'll advertise till we fill the place with buyers, and we'll make our pile right there and then—and it's all to be done by Darley Champers & Co. We two are not to be in the open in the game at all."

Thomas Smith spoke deliberately. There seemed to be none of Champers' bluster nor Wyker's malice in the third part of the company, or else he was better schooled in self-control.

"You have it exactly," Champers declared. "The first thing is to take in fellows like Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart, and Aydelot, if we can."

"Yes, if we can, but we can't," Thomas Smith insisted.

"And having got the land, with or without their knowing why, we boom her to destruction. But to be fair, now, why do you want to keep yourself in hiding, and who's the fellow you want to kill?" Darley Champers said with a laugh.

"I may as well let you know now why I can't be known in this," Thomas Smith said smoothly, even if the same gray hue did flit like a shadow a second time across his countenance—a thing that did not escape the shrewd eye of Darley Champers this time.

"Wyker is pitted against Jacobs. You are after Asher Aydelot's scalp, if you can get it. I must get Jim Shirley, fair or foul."

Smith's low voice was full of menace, boding more trouble to his man than the bluster and threat of the other two could compass.

"I paid you well, Darley Champers, for all information concerning Jim when I came here fifteen years ago. I was acting under orders, and as Jim would have known me then I had to keep out of sight a little."

"Vell, and vot has Shirley ever done mit you that you so down on him?" Hans Wyker asked.

The smooth mask did not drop from Smith's face, save that the small dark eyes burned with an intense glow.

"I tell you I was acting under orders from Shirley's brother Tank in Cloverdale, Ohio. And if Dr. Carey hadn't been so blamed quick I'd have gotten a letter Mrs. Tank Shirley had written to Jim the very day I got to Carey's Crossing. No brother ever endured more from the hands of a relative than Tank Shirley endured from Jim. In every way Jim tried to defraud him of his rights; tried to prejudice their own father against him; tried to rob him of the girl, a rich girl, too, that he married in spite Of Jim—and at last contrived to prejudice his wife against him, and with Jane Aydelot interfering all the time, like the old maid that she is, managed to get Tank Shirley's only child away from him and given legally to Jim. Do you wonder Tank hates his brother? You wouldn't if I dared to tell you all of Jim's cussedness, but some things I'm sworn to secrecy on. That's Tank's streak of kindness he can't overcome. Gets it from his mother. I'm his agent, and I'm paid for my work. You both understand me, I reckon."

"We unterstant, an' we stay py you to der ent," Hans Wyker exclaimed enthusiastically. But Darley Champers had a different mind.

"I'll watch you, my man, and I'll do business with you accordin'," he said to himself. "Devil knows whether you are Thomas Smith workin' for Tank Shirley, or Tank Shirley workin' for hisself under a assoomed name. Long as I get your capital to push my business I don't care who you are." Aloud he remarked:

"So that's how Jim Shirley got that little girl. She's a comely youngun, anyhow. But Smith, since you are only an agent and nobody knows it but us, why keep yourself so secret? Where's the harm in letting Shirley lay eyes on you? Why not come out into the open? How'll Shirley know you from the Mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, anyhow?"

Thomas Smith's face was ashy and his voice was hoarse with anger as he replied:

"Because I'm not now from Wilmington, Delaware, any more than I ever was. I'm from Cloverdale, Ohio. You know, Wyker, how I lost money in your brewery, investing in machinery and starting the thing, only to go to smash on us."

He turned on Hans fiercely.

"And you know how I lost by you in this town and the land around it. It was my money took up all this ground to help build up Wykerton and you, as my agent, sold every acre of it to Jacobs."

This as fiercely as Darley Champers.

Both men nodded and Darley broke in:

"I was honest. I thought Jacobs was gettin' it to boom Wykerton with, or I'd never sold. And him bein' right here was a danged sight easier'n havin' some man in Wilmington, Delaware, to write to. That's why I let him in on three sides, appealin' to his pride."

But Thomas Smith stopped him abruptly.

"Hold on! You need money to push your schemes now. And I'm the one who does the financing for you."

Both men agreed.

"Then it's death to either of you if you ever tell a word of this. You understand that? I'm not to be known here because I'm a dead man. I'm the cashier that was mixed up in the Cloverdale bank affair. And, as I say, if Jane Aydelot had let things alone Tank Shirley and I could have pulled out honorably, but, womanlike, because she had a lot of bank stock and was the biggest loser of anybody, in her own mind, she pushed things where a man would not have noticed or kept still, and she kept pushing year after year. Damn a woman, anyhow! All I could do at last was to commit suicide. Tank planned it. It saved me and helped Tank. You see, Miss Jane had a line around his neck, too. She was the only one who really saw me go down and she spread the report that I'd committed suicide on account of the bank failure. So, gentlemen, I'm really drowned in Clover Creek right above where the railroad grade that cuts the Aydelot farm reaches the water."

Darley Champers wondered why Thomas Smith was so particular in his description.

"I've known Jim Shirley all my life. He was as bad a boy as ever left Cloverdale, Ohio, under a cloud. Got into trouble over some girl, I believe, finally. But you can see why I'm out of this game when it comes to the open. And maybe you could understand, if you knew the brothers as well as I do, why Tank keeps me after him. And I'll get him yet."

The vengeance of the last words was venomous.

"Well, now we understand each other we'll not be tramping on anybody's corns," Darley Champers urged, anxious to get away from the subject.

With all of his shortcomings he was a man of different mould from the other men. Eagerness to represent and invest large capital and to make by far the best of a bargain by any means just inside the law were his besetments. But he had not the unremitting hatred that enslaved Thomas Smith and Hans Wyker.

Champers' store of energy seemed exhaustless. Following this council he fell upon the Grass River Valley and threshed it to his profit.

One mid-June evening the Grass River schoolhouse was lighted early, while up from the prairie ranches came the work-worn farmers.

This year the crop outlook was bad, yet somehow an expectant spirit lifted sagging shoulders and looked out through hopeful eyes.

While the men exchanged neighborly greetings, a group of children, the second generation in the valley, romped about in the twilight outside.

"Here comes Thaine," they shouted as Asher Aydelot and his boy came down the trail.

"Come on, Thaine," Leigh Shirley said, reaching for his hand. "We are going to play drop the handkerchief."

"Thaine's going to stand by me," pretty Jo Bennington declared, pushing Leigh boisterously aside.

Josephine, the week-old baby Mrs. Aydelot had gone to see one day nine years ago, had grown into a big, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl who lorded it over every other child in the neighborhood. And every other child submitted except Leigh Shirley, who had a quiet habit of going straight ahead about her affairs in a way that vexed the pretty Jo not a little. From the first coming of Leigh among the children Jo had resented her independence. But, young as they all were, she objected most to Thaine Aydelot's claiming Leigh as his playmate. Thaine was Jo's idol from earliest memory.

"What's the row here?" Todd Stewart, Junior, broke in. "You mustn't fuss or you'll all have to go in and listen to Darley Champers and I'll play out here by myself."

Todd was a young-hearted, half-grown boy now, able to work all day in the hayfield or to romp like a child with younger children in the evening. He was half a dozen years older than Thaine and Jo, a difference that would tend to disappear by the end of a decade.

"We'll be good, Toddie, if you'll let us stay and you'll play with us," the children entreated, and the game began, with Thaine between Leigh and Jo.

When Asher Aydelot joined the group inside Darley Champers rapped on the desk and called the men to order.

"Gentlemen, let's have a businesslike proceeding," he said. "Who shall preside at the meeting?"

"I move Jim Shirley be made chairman. He's the best looking man here," Todd Stewart said, half seriously.

The motion carried and Jim, looking big and handsome and kindly as always, took the chair.

"I'll ask Mr. Champers to state the purpose of the meeting," he said.

"Gentlemen," Champers began with tremendous dignity, "I represent the firm of the Champers Town Company, just chartered, with half a million dollars' capital. Gentlemen, you have the finest valley in Kansas."

The same was said of every other valley in Kansas in the fat years of the boom. But to do Darley justice, he had never made a finer effort in his life of many efforts than he was bent on making tonight.

"And this site is the garden spot of it all," he continued. "The elevation, the water power at the deep bend of Grass River (where at that moment only a trace of water marked the river's grassy right of way), the fine farming land—everything ready for a sudden leap into prosperity. And, gentlemen, the A. and T. (Arctic and Tropic) North and South Railroad will begin grading down this very stream inside of thirty days. A town here this year will be a city next year, a danged sight bigger city than Careyville will ever be. Why, that town's got its growth and is beginning to decay right now. The A. and T. will miss it comin' south, by ten mile."

He paused and looked at the men before him. They were farmers, drooped to rest after the long summer day's work, yet they listened with intense eagerness. Only Asher Aydelot sat in easy dignity, looking straight at Darley Champers with steady interest. The four years' training in the University of the Civil War had not been overcome by his hold on the plow handles. And no farmer will grow hopelessly stooped in shoulders and sad of countenance who lifts his face often from the clods beneath his feet to the stars above his head.

"You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin' this year," Champers continued. "But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that's bound to come."

The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him.

"When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn't nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What's to prevent a metropolis risin' right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn't nothing but bare prairie?"

The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers' smooth advances.

"Our company's chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can't be bought for no price. It's your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein' you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads 'stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land."

Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers' holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.

"Maybe some of you fellows haven't felt right toward me sometimes," he said. "I hate to tell it now, but justice is justice. The truth is, it was a friend of yours who advised me not to let any supplies come your way, time of the grasshopper raid. I listened to him then and didn't know no better'n to be run by him till I see his scheme to kill Wykerton an' build a town for hisself. He'll deny it now, declare he never done it, and he'll not do a thing for your town down here. See if he does. But it's Gawd's truth, he held me back so's he could run you his way. It's your turn to listen to me now and believe me, too."

And well they listened, especially the men who still owed John Jacobs for the loan of 1874.

"You can have a boom right here that'll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I'm ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail's pace of earnin' and go to livin' like gentlemen—like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won't improve so's to help others?"

"You're right there," a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out. "We all know how Careyville got her start. It's kept some of us poor doing it. I'll invest in Town Company stock right now."

Asher Aydelot turned toward the speaker in surprise.

"Jacobs helped you out as well as the rest of us in the drouth and grasshopper time of seventy-four," he said. "What's your grievance against him now?"

"Yes, and hung onto me like a leech of a Jew ever since," the man muttered.

"Because you never paid either interest or principal. And Jacobs has carried you along and waited your time," Asher asserted frankly.

But the farmer plunged into the discussion again, not realizing that his grudge against Careyville was the outgrowth of his own shortcomings.

"Take this site right here in the middle of your neighborhood where you've already got your church and your schoolhouse, and your graveyard," Champers declared. "Aydelot here gave part of it and Pryor Gaines the rest. Gaines don't farm it any more himself, it's most too big a job for a man of brains like him. And that quarter across the river that used to be all sand, you own that now, Aydelot, don't you? What did you think of doin' with it now?"

"I think I'll set it in alfalfa this fall," Asher replied.

"Yes, yes, now these two make the very site we want. You are lucky, for you are ready right now to start things. How much stock do you want, Aydelot, and how will you sell?"

As Asher listened he seemed to see the whole scheme of the town builder bare itself before him, and he wondered at the credulity of his neighbors.

"Gentlemen," he said, standing before them, "it is a hard thing to put yourself against neighborhood sentiment and not seem to be selfish. But as I was the first man in this valley and have known every man who settled here since, I ought to be well enough known to you to need no certificate of good moral character here. I offer no criticism on the proposition before you. You are as capable of judging as I am. The end may show you more capable, but I decline to buy stock, or to donate, or sell any land for a townsite at the deep bend of Grass River. A man's freehold is his own."

Asher's influence had led in Grass River affairs for years. But Darley Champers had the crowd in the hollow of his paw tonight.

"How about Gaines?" he demanded. "You join him on the south. You ought to know some of his notions."

"Gaines has no land to consider," Asher said frankly. "He sold it more than a year ago."

"You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don't you?" someone said sarcastically.

"You'll have to ask the preacher," Asher replied good-naturedly. "I didn't understand it so at the time. But as for myself, I'm no boomer. I stand for the prosperity that builds from day to day, and stays built. The values here are in the soil, not in the shining bubbles that glitter and burst on top of it. You'll have to count me out of your scheme. I'm a farmer still. So I'll wish you all good luck and good night."

"Good night, I must go with papa," Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from his play outside.

"No, you've got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh," Jo Bennington commanded, clutching at Thaine's arm.

Leigh sat calmly disobedient.

"He's his papa's boy, I guess, and he ought to go," she asserted.

"You meany, meany," Jo whispered, "I don't like you."

But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.

As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers' eyes.

"No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged clod-hopper farmer, but he don't leave no enemies behind him. That's enough to make any man hate him. He's balked twice when I tried to drive. I'll not be fooled by him always."

So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.

"Shirley, where is Pryor tonight?" Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with the query. "I couldn't get him to come; said he had no land for sale nor money to invest," Jim replied.

"Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs. Easy to see what he wants. He ain't boomin' no place but Careyville," Champers snarled. "But the deep bend ain't the only bend in Grass River. Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your door?"

Nobody wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom days turn away from the promise of a fortune.

So the boom came to the Grass River Valley as other disasters had come before it. Where a decade and a half ago Asher and Virginia Aydelot had lived alone with each other and God, in the heart of the wide solitary wilderness, the town of Cloverdale was staked out now over the prairie.

Stock in the new venture sold rapidly, and nobody ever knew how much clear profit came to Champers & Co. from this venture. A big slice of the Cloverdale ranch went into the staking of the new city, and prosperity seemed wedded to Jim Shirley. He ceased farming and became a speculator with dreams of millions in his brain. Other settlers followed his example until the fever had infected every man in the community except Asher Aydelot, who would not give up to it, and Pryor Gaines, who had nothing to give up.

Everything fell out as advertised. The railroad grade swelled up like a great welt across the land, seemingly in a day. Suburban additions radiated for miles in every direction. Bonds were voted for light and water and public buildings and improvements. Speculators rushed to invest and unload their investments at a profit. The Grass River Farmers' Company built the Grass River Creamery. And because it looked big and good they built the Grass River Sugar Factory and the Grass River Elevator. But while they were building their money into stone and machinery they forgot to herd cattle to supply the creamery and to grow cane for the sugar product and to sow and reap grain to be elevated.

Also, the Cloverdale Farmers' Company, made up mostly of the members of the Grass River Farmers' Company, built the Cloverdale Hotel, and the Cloverdale State Bank, and the Cloverdale Office Block. And the sad part of it all was that mortgaged and doubly mortgaged farms and not the price of crops had furnished the capital for the boom building.

It is an old story now, and none too interesting—the story of a boom town, founded on prairie breezes and built out of fortune seekers' dreams.

Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot, watching the sudden easy prosperity of his neighbors, fought down the temptation to join them and resolutely strove with the soil for its best yield. The drouth and hot winds had not forgotten all their old tricks, and even the interest on his mortgage could not be met promptly sometimes. Yet with the same old Aydelot tenacity with which his father had held Cloverdale in Ohio away from the old farm beside the National pike road, the son of this father held the boundary of the Sunflower Ranch intact, nor yielded up one acre to be platted into a suburban addition to the new Cloverdale in the Grass River Valley in Kansas. And all the while the Aydelot windbreaks strengthened; the Aydelot grove struck deeper root; the long corn furrows and the acres on acres of broken wheat stubble of the Sunflower Ranch wooed the heavier rainfall, narrowing the sand dunes and deepening the water courses.

For two brief years Cloverdale, in the Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave.

Then the bubble burst, and all that the boom had promised fell to nothingness. Many farms were mortgaged, poor crops worked tribulation, taxes began to eat up acres of weed-grown vacant town lots, Eastern money was withdrawn to other markets, speculators departed, the strange enthusiasm burned itself out, and the Wilderness came again to the Grass River Valley. Not the old Wilderness of loneliness, and drouth, and grasshoppers, and prairie fires that had dared the pioneer to conquest; but the Prairie, waiting again the kingly hand on the plow handle, gave no quarter to him whom the gilded boom had lured to shipwreck.



PART TWO

THE SON

Give me the land where miles of wheat Ripple beneath the wind's light feet, Where the green armies of the corn Sway in the first sweet breath of morn; Give me the large and liberal land Of the open heart and the generous hand; Under the wide-spaced Kansas sky Let me live and let me die. —Harry A. Kemp.



CHAPTER XIII

THE ROLLCALL

Nothing is too late Until the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. —Longfellow.

The twilight had fallen on the prairie. Grass River, running bank full from the heavy May rains, lay like a band of molten silver glistening in the after-sunset light. The draw, once choked with wild plum bushes in the first days of the struggle in the wilderness, was the outlet now to the little lake that nestled in the heart of the Aydelot grove. The odors of early summer came faintly on the soft twilight breeze. Somewhere among the cottonwoods a bird called a tender good-night to its mate. Upon the low swell the lights were beginning to twinkle from the windows of the Aydelot home, and the sounds of voices and of hurrying footsteps told of something unusual going on within. Asher Aydelot, driving down the old Grass River trail, saw from far away the windows of his home beginning to glow like beacons in the twilight. Beyond it was the glimmer of the waters of the river and before it spread the mile-long grove, dim and shadowy in the mist-folds rising up from the prairie.

"A man can win a kingdom in the West, I told my mother one spring evening long ago," he murmured as his eyes took in the view. "It's surely more like a kingdom now than it was when we came down this trail a quarter of a century ago. Twenty-five good years of life, but it's worth the effort, and we are just now at the opening of our best years. A man's real usefulness begins at fifty. This is more like a kingdom, too, than it was ten years ago when those old hulks of wrecks that strew the prairie down the river were banks, and hotels, and opera houses, and factories of boomed-up Cloverdale. We are doing something for the land. I hope our boy will make up his mind to want to keep it when his time comes."

He lifted his head bravely, as if to throw off all doubt, and tightening the reins on his horses he swung away down the trail toward the home lights shining in the gathering gloom.

As he neared the house Thaine Aydelot leaped from the side porch and hurried toward him. Climbing into the moving wagon, he put one hand affectionately on his father's shoulder.

"Don't you know whose birthday this is?" he inquired with serious countenance, "and you've not spoken to me all day."

"I know my boy is nineteen today and expects to have a birthday party here tonight, and that I left him asleep when I started to town this forenoon about nine o'clock."

"Nine cats! You left at six sharp to go with John Jacobs over to Wolf Creek after what you never got, judging from this empty wagon. And I had half of the feeding done when you left the house here. I saw you when I was out by the old stone corral looking after the pigs, but they squealed so loud you could not hear me telling you good-by."

"All pigs squeal alike to me," Asher began, but Thaine choked him to silence.

"Hurry up and get togged out for the party," he urged. "The Benningtons will be over early. Jo's been here all day. I'll take care of the horses. Hike!"

"Be sure to rub them down. They had to pull hard today," Asher called back as he went up the walk toward the house.

"Oh, fiddle! Always take care of a horse like it was a prize poodle. Farms like he was decorating chinaware. Good enough dad, but too particular. Me for the State University and the professional or military life. This ranch is all right for Asher Aydelot, but it's pretty blamed slow for T. A. And Jo Bennington doesn't like a farm either," he added with a smile.

In the superiority of his youth Thaine fumed at his father's commands, but failed not to obey them. He was just nineteen, as tall as his father, and brawny with the strength of the outdoors life of the prairie ranch. Strength of character was not expressed in his face so much as the promise of strength with the right conditions for its development in future days. His features were his mother's set in masculine lines, with the same abundant dark hair, the same lustrous dark eyes, the same straight nose and well-formed chin. The same imperious will of all the Thaines to do as he chose was his heritage, too, and he walked the prairies like a king.

"The real story of the plains is the story of the second generation; the real romance here will be Thaine Aydelot's romance, for he was born here."

So Virginia Aydelot had declared on the day she had gone to visit the Bennington baby, Josephine, and coming home had met Asher with little Thaine beside Mercy Pennington's grave. Sorrow for the dead had become a tender memory that day, and joy in the living made life full of hope.

In Virginia's mind a pretty romance was begun in which Thaine and Josephine were central figures. For mothers will evermore weave romances for their children so long as the memory of their own romance lives.

The time of the second generation came swiftly, even before the wilderness of the father's day had been driven entirely from the prairie. Some compensation for the loss of eastern advantages belonged to the simple life of the plains children. If they lacked the culture of city society they were also without its frivolity and temptations. What the prairies denied them in luxuries they matched with a resourcefulness to meet their needs. Something of the breadth of the landscape and of the free sweeping winds of heaven gave them breadth and power to look the world squarely in the face, and to measure it at its true value, when their hour for action came.

The Grass River children could ride like Plains Indians. They could cut a steer out of a herd and prevent or escape a stampede. They had no fear of distance, nor storm, nor prairie fire, nor blizzard. Because their opportunities were few, they squandered them the less. Matched against the city-bred young folks their talents differed in kind, not in number, nor in character-value.

Tonight the Aydelots were to give a party in honor of Thaine's birthday, and the farmhouse was dressed for the occasion. Thaine had been busy all day carrying furniture in or out, mowing the front lawn where the old double fireguard once lay, and fixing a seat under the white honeysuckle trellis, "for the afflicted ones," he declared to pretty Jo Bennington. Jo's blush was becoming. Thaine felt sure that he must be in love with her. All the other boys were, too, he knew that well enough.

"What's going on in the dining room?" Asher asked, as he sat at supper with Virginia in the kitchen.

"The decorating committee is fixing it up for dancing. Bo Peep is coming with his fiddle and there'll be a sound of revelry by night."

"Who's the decorating committee?" Asher inquired.

"Jo Bennington is helping Thaine, and our new hired girl, Rosie Gimpke, from over on Little Wolf. She came this morning just after you left," Virginia replied. "She acts and looks like she'd never had a kind word spoken to her."

"Rosie Gimpke must be Hans Wyker's granddaughter. There's a nest of them over on Little Wolf. They give John Jacobs no end of trouble, but you must have help," Asher said thoughtfully.

Virginia's mind was not on hired help, however, as the sound of laughter came from the dining room.

"The bridal wreath and snowballs make it look like a wedding was expected in there," she declared.

"Will the Arnolds and the Archibalds be up? Have you heard from the Spoopendykes and the Gilliwigs?" Asher inquired with a smile.

"Oh, Asher! What a change since the days when we invented parties for our lonely evenings here! What has become of the old prairie?"

"It's out there still, under the wheat fields. We have driven the wilderness back; plowed a fireguard around the whole valley; tempered the hot winds by windbreaks and groves."

"It seems impossible that there ever was a one-room sod cabin here, and only you and I and Jim and faithful old Pilot in all the valley."

"Since so many things have come true it may be that many more will also by the time Thaine is as old as I was when I came out here and thought the Lord had forgotten all about this prairie until I reminded Him of it. We can almost forget the hard work and the waiting for results," Asher said.

"Oh, we don't want to forget," Virginia replied. "Not a season's joy or sorrow but had its uses for us. Do you remember that first supper here and the sunflowers in the old tin can?"

"Yes, and Jim sitting outside so lonely. What a blessing Leigh has been to his life. There they come now."

The next moment Jim's tall form filled the doorway.

"Good evening, folks. I can't resist the habit of the sod shack days to come right into the kitchen. I understand that we forty-niners are to have an old settlers' reunion while the young folks dance," he said.

There were lines of care on his face now, suggesting a bodily weariness that might never grow less. The old hopefulness and purpose seemed fading away. But the kindly light of the eyes had not disappeared, nor the direct gaze of an honest man whose judgment might bring him to tragedy, while his sense of honor was still sublime.

"Come in, Jim. Where are Pryor and Leigh? Did you take it you were all we expected?" Asher asked.

"Leigh went in the front door like a Christian. As to Pryor," he hesitated a moment. "I'll tell you later about him."

"Take this chair. I must help the children," Virginia said cordially as she rose and left the kitchen.

Leigh Shirley was coming from the front hall as she entered the dining room, and Virginia paused a moment to look at her. Something about Leigh made most people want more than a glance. Tonight, as she stood in the doorway, Virginia could think of nothing but the pink roses that grew in the rose garden of the old Thaine mansion house of her girlhood. A vision swept across her memory of Asher Aydelot—just Thaine's age then—of a moonlit night, sweet with the odor of many blossoms, and the tinkling waters of the fountain in the rose garden, and herself a happy young girl.

Leigh's fair face was set in the golden brown shadows of her hair. On either side of her square white forehead the sunny ripples kept the only memory of the golden curls of babyhood. The darker eyebrows and heavy lashes and the deep violet-blue eyes, the pink bloom of the cheeks, and the resolute mouth gave to Leigh's face all the charm of the sweet young girl. But the deeper charm that claimed the steady gaze lay in the spirit back of the face, in the self-reliance and penetrating power, combined with something of the artist's dreams; and swayed altogether by genuine good nature and good will.

Tonight she wore a simple white gown revealing her white throat and the line of her neck and shoulder. White flowers nestled in the folds of her hair, and the whole effect enhanced the dainty coloring of cheeks and lips. Leigh had an artist's eye in dress and knew by instinct what to wear. She had an artist's hand also, as her mother had had before her, and was far more skilled in the painting of prairie landscapes than any of the Grass River folk dreamed of.

Thaine was busy on the top of the stepladder and did not see Leigh as she came in. Jo Bennington, who was holding sprays of spirea for him to festoon above the window, stared at Leigh until Thaine, waiting for the flowers, turned to see the pink-cheeked living picture framed against the shadows of the hall behind her.

"I thought you were coming early to help us. This Gimpke girl doesn't know how to do a thing," Jo exclaimed.

If her voice was a trifle high-pitched it was not out of keeping with her brilliant coloring and dashing manners. Even the thoughtless rebuke of the Gimpke girl seemed excusable from her lips, and Rosie Gimpke looked at her with unblinking eyes.

"You can put on my apron and finish, but don't change a thing, now mind. I'll go and dress. I brought my whole wardrobe over early in the week," Jo rattled on, and thrusting her gingham apron into Leigh's hands she dashed through the hall toward the stairway.

Rosie Gimpke, the tow-headed image of her mother, Gretchen Wyker, stared at Leigh, who smiled back at her. Rosie was stupid and ignorant, but she knew the difference between Jo Bennington's frown and Leigh Shirley's smile. A saving thing, the smile of good will, and worth its cost in any market.

"Shall I help you too, or shall Rosie and I look after the refreshments?" Virginia asked as she greeted Leigh.

"No, run along and get dressed. Rosie knows just how to fix things in the kitchen, and I never need anybody else if Leigh can help me," Thaine declared. "How is this, Leigh?"

Leigh gave a quick glance and answered: "Too heavy everywhere? Can we fix it right?" "You bet we can. I'm not going to have a thing wrong tonight," Thaine answered her. "But Jo fixed it, and you know Jo."

Leigh made no reply, but went about the rearrangement with swift artistic skill; while Jo, who had changed her mind about being in a hurry, slipped down stairs to the dining room again. At the doorway she discovered the undoing of her work. For a minute or two she watched the pair, then passed unnoticed up stairs again. Leigh Shirley was the only girl who ever dared to oppose Jo, and she did it so quietly and completely that Jo could only ignore her. She could not retaliate.

"Jo Bennington, you are the prettiest girl in Kansas, and I claim the first dance and the last, and some in-betweens, right now," Thaine declared when she appeared again.

Jo was tall and graceful and imperious in her manner. The oldest and handsomest child in a large family, she had had her own way at home and with her associates all her life. Her world was made to give way to her from the beginning, until nothing seemed possible or popular without her sanction. Tonight her heavy black hair was coiled in braids about her head, her black eyes were full of youthful glow and her cheeks were like June roses. She wore a pink lawn dress vastly becoming to her style, and a string of old-fashioned pearl beads was wound through her dark braids.

"You'd better make amends for spoiling all my pretty work as you and Leigh have done," she said in reply to Thaine's frank compliment. "I'll make it a few more dances, for you do dance better than any of the other boys—"

"Except Todd Stewart, Junior," the owner of the name, who had just come in, declared. "There is to be a birthday party and an old settlers' meeting, and maybe a French duel or two before midnight. I remember when I was the only kid in the Grass River Valley. There were others at first, but I always thought the grasshoppers or Darley Champers ate 'em. And Jo is the first white girl baby born in captivity here. We'll lead the opening of this ball or shoot up the ranch. You can have Jo for the last dance, Thaine, my son, but me first."

"Oh, that's fine," Jo declared as Thaine was about to protest. "Serves you right for spoiling my decorations. But, Thaine, I claim you for the in-betweens and the last. Let's take one more look at the refreshments—that Gimpke girl may have them all in a mess by this time."

There was a rush for the kitchen, where Leigh Shirley was already showing Rosie how to keep the table of dishes in order.

Meanwhile, Asher Aydelot had gone out to the seat Thaine had put up under the honeysuckle trellis.

"It is early for the crowd, Virgie. Come here and watch Boanerges Peeperville tuning up," Asher Aydelot said as Virginia stood on the veranda a little later.

She came out to the seat under a bower of sweet white honeysuckle and sat down beside her husband.

"The same Bo Peep of the old Virginia days, only he was a half-grown boy then," she said, watching the Negro bending above his violin. "How faithfully he has served Dr. Carey all these years. He's past forty now. Asher, we are all getting along."

"With a boy nineteen tonight, how can it be otherwise?" Asher replied. "But when the Careyville crowd gets here I'm going to ask you for a dance, anyhow, Miss Thaine."

Virginia stood in the moonlight and looked out over the prairie slumbering in a silver-broidered robe of evening mist.

"How fast the years have gone. Do you remember the night in the old Thaine home in Virginia when you were our guest—too sick to dance?" she asked.

Asher caught her arm and drew her to the seat beside him.

"I remember the jessamine vines and the arbor at the end of the rose garden."

"We are not old until we forget our own romance days," Virginia said. "You were my hero that night. You are my hero still."

"Even with a son as old now as I was that night? The real romance of the prairie, you've said it often, Virgie, is Thaine Aydelot's romance. There's little chance for the rest of us."

The coming of the guests just then called the host and hostess to the parlor, and the evening's festivities began.

In the building of the Aydelot home there was a memory of the old farmhouse beside the National pike road in Ohio and the old Thaine mansion house of the South. The picture the mirage had revealed to Virginia Aydelot on the afternoon when she rode the long lonely miles from Wykerton with John Jacob's message of hope in her keeping—that wonderful mirage picture had grown toward a reality with the slowly winning years. Tonight, with the lighted rooms and the music of the violin, and the sound of laughter and the rhythm of dancing feet, and outside the May moonlight on the veranda with its vine-draped columns, and the big elm trees throwing long shadows down the lawn, with the odor of plowed fields and blossoming grain and shrub mingled with the perfume floating from the creamy catalpa blooms in the shadowy grove, all made a picture not unworthy to hang beside the painting of an Ohio landscape or an old Virginia mansion.

"Here's where the forty-niners get the best of it," Jim Shirley declared, as the older men gathered about the veranda steps. "We're dead certain of ourselves now. We're not like those youngsters in there with their battles before 'em."

"There hasn't been such a gathering as this in ten years. Not since the night Darley Champers herded us into the schoolhouse and blew a boom down our throats through a goosequill," Cyrus Bennington declared.

"See that black thing away across the prairie east of Aydelot's grove. Wait till the moon gets out from that cloud. Now!" Todd Stewart directed the eyes of all to a tall black object distinct in the moonlight.

"That's the Cloverdale Farmers' Company's elevator. Looks like a lighthouse stretching up in that sea of wheat."

"There are plenty of derelicts in that sea as well as some human derelicts left afloat," Jim said, with a laugh. "Let's take the census."

"Begin with Darley Champers," Asher suggested.

"Not present. Who got his excuse?" Jim inquired.

"He sent it by me," Horace Carey spoke up. "Business still keeping him busy. He's a humane man."

"Up to a point he is," John Jacobs broke in. "Let's be fair. He is a large-sized boomer and a small-sized rascal. A few deals won't bear the light of day, but mainly they are inside the law. I've let him handle all but my grazing land around Wykerton. He's done well by me. But he's been at his line a quarter of a century and he'll end where he began—in a real estate office over in Wykerton, trying to get something for nothing and calling it business."

"Horace Carey?" Jim Shirley called next.

"Here," Carey replied.

"With a big H," Todd Stewart declared. "Same doctor of the old school. Why don't you get married or take a trip to India, Doctor? Not that we aren't satisfied all over with you as you are, though, and wouldn't hear to your doing either one. You belong to all of us now."

"I may have a call to a bigger practice some day, a service that will make you proud of your former honorable townsman. At present I'm satisfied," Carey said, with a smile.

Four years later the men remembered this reply and the attractive face of the speaker, the sound of his voice, and the whole magnetic presence of the man.

"John Jacobs?" Shirley called next.

"The merchant prince of Careyville," Asher Aydelot declared. "The money-loaning Shylock. Didn't let the boom so much as turn one hair black or white. Land owner and stock raiser of the Wolf Creek Valley and hater of saloons seven days in the week. Whatever it may mean in New York and Cincinnati and Chicago, being a Jew means being a gentleman in this corner of Kansas," Asher was running on, till John Jacobs threw a chair cushion at his head and Jim called out:

"Cyrus Bennington."

"Busted by the boom. Lived at the public crib ever since. Held every little county office possible to get, asking now for your votes this fall for County Treasurer. Will end his days seeking an election and go at last to be with the elected," Cyrus Bennington frankly described himself.

"Not so bad yet as Todd Stewart," Todd declared. "He lost everything in the boom except his old Scotch Presbyterian faith. Now head clerk in J. Jacobs' dry goods and general merchandise store. Had the good sense, though, this old Todd did, to send his son back to the land and make a farmer out of him, and the second generation of Stewarts in this valley promises to make it yet. Why don't you revert to the soil, too, Bennington?"

"Todd is doing well with his leases," Asher Aydelot declared. "He'll be a landowner yet."

"My family, especially the girls, object to living on a farm," Cyrus Bennington said gravely. "They have notions of city life I can't overcome. Jo especially dislikes the country and Jo runs things round the Bennington place."

"James Shirley, Esquire," Jim announced and added quickly:

"The biggest sucker in the booming gang. Lost his farm to the Champers Company. Holds a garden patch and homestead only, where once the Cloverdale Ranch smiled. All under mortgage also to other capitalists. Boys, I'd be ready to give up if it wasn't for my little girl. What's the use in a man as big as I am, with no lung power, keeping at it?" There was a sad hopelessness in Shirley's tone.

"No, no!" the men chorused in one voice. "Go on, Jim, go on!"

"Asher Aydelot." Jim pretended it was the rollcall they demanded.

"Gentlemen," John Jacobs began seriously. But at that moment Leigh Shirley, followed by Rosie Gimpke, came from the side door with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of lemonade.

"Gentlemen, a toast to the man who stuck to the soil and couldn't be blasted to financial ruin by a boom, the wheat king of these prairies. Our host, Asher Aydelot."

"The clod-hopper, Buckeye farmer," Jim added affectionately, and they drank to Asher's health.

"Lord bless you, Aydelot. You said the money was in the soil, not on top of it. I remember you looked like a prophet when you said it," Cyrus Bennington declared. "But I was wild to get rich quick and let my soil go. I never look at Aydelot's spreading acres of wheat increasing in area every year without wondering why the Lord let me be such a fool."

"Well, you've spent a lot of days in an easy chair in the shade of a county office since then while I was driving a reaper in the hot sunshine," Asher insisted.

"You are the strongest man here now, for all your farm work, Aydelot," John Jacobs asserted. "It is the store that really breaks a man down."

"Not in his nerve, nor in pocketbook," Todd Stewart added. "Here's a toast, now, to the second generation, and especially to Thaine Aydelot, son of the Sunflower Ranch. Nineteen years old tonight."

"What is Thaine going to follow, Asher?" someone inquired. "I suppose you'll be making a gentleman out of him, since he's your only child."

"My father tried to make a gentleman out of me and failed, as you see," Asher replied.

"Tragic failure," Jim groaned.

"Seriously, Aydelot, what's Thaine to do?" The query came from Dr. Carey; the company awaited the answer.

"He isn't wanting to follow anything right now. He has a notion that the earth is following him," Asher said with a smile. "And having handled Aydelots all my life, I'm letting him alone a little with the hope that at last he'll come back to the soil as I did. He goes to the Kansas University this fall and he has all sorts of notions, even a craving for military glory. I can't blame him. I had the same disease once. I don't believe in any wild oats business. I hope Thaine will be a gentleman, but I don't wonder that a green country boy who has looked out all his life on open prairies and lonely distances should have a longing for city pavements and the busy haunts of men. How well he will make his way and what he will let these things fit him to do depends somewhat on how well grounded the farm life and home life have made him. The old French Aydelot blood had something of the wanderlust in it. I hope that trait may not reappear in Thaine. But where's Pryor Gaines in this rollcall? We are getting away from the subject before the house."

Jim Shirley's handsome face grew sorrowful.

"He was not affected by the boom. He has been the same man in spirit and fortune for twenty-five years. But we are going to lose him. That's why he's not here tonight," Jim hurried on as the others were about to interrupt him. "He won't say good-by to anybody. You can understand why. He's going to start for China tomorrow morning—missionary! It's the last of Pryor Gaines for us. I promised not to tell till he was gone. I've lied to him. That's all. But you'll not tell on me nor let him know. He says he's 'called.' And when a preacher gets that in his blood there's no stopping him."

At that moment Virginia Aydelot and a group of matrons came thronging out.

"Come in for the Virginia Reel," they demanded. "The young folks are having refreshments on the side porch and Bo Peep wants us to dance for him."

"May I have the honor?" Horace Carey said, bowing to Virginia Aydelot.

"With pleasure, Horace," Virginia replied with a smile.

As they led the way to the dining room, Dr. Carey said:

"I congratulate you tonight, Virginia, on your son, your kingly husband, and your busy, useful life. You've won the West, you two."

"Not yet," Virginia replied. "Not until our son proves himself. He's a farmer's boy now. Wait five years till he is the age his father was when he came out here. The test of victory is the second generation."

Bo Peep's fiddle began its song and the still young middle-aged guests with their host and hostess kept time to its rhythm.



CHAPTER XIV

THE SECOND GENERATION

The younger generation does not want instruction. It is perfectly willing to instruct if anyone will listen to it. —The Education of Otis Yeere.

The second generation gave little thought to what was filling the minds of the first settlers tonight. The company was a large one and a dozen years later more than one young matron remembered Thaine Aydelot's birthday party as the beginning of a romance that ended happily for her.

"Jo, you are the queen of the ball tonight," Todd Stewart, Junior, declared, as he led her to the cool veranda after their fourth dance together.

Jo looked the part in the moonlight, as in the lamplight.

"Oh, no, I'm not. Leigh Shirley is Thaine's favorite, and his choice is queen tonight," Jo said coquettishly.

"Darn him! We all know who his choice is, all right," Todd said. "But, Jo, can't a fellow have half a chance, anyhow? You know, you can't help knowing a lot of us would fight for you."

He caught her hand in his and she did not resist at once.

"Oh, Jo, I know one fellow, anyhow—"

"Look at Thaine now," Jo interrupted him, as Thaine came near the open window. "Todd, do you know why he thinks so much of Leigh Shirley?"

"Of Leigh? Does he? I hope he does. He shows good taste, anyhow. Everybody from Little Plum Creek clear to Northfork likes Leigh."

Jo's eyes flashed.

"She must be very popular."

"Oh, not as they like you, Jo. You must know the difference between you two, a real beauty and a sweet little girlie."

"She's not so sweet. She tries to attract and doesn't know how," Jo declared, for jealousy belongs to the dominant.

Todd Stewart's sense of justice was strong, even in his infatuation.

"Why, Jo, you mustn't be jealous of Leigh. She's the girl the boys can't make like them. She's the funniest, settest little creature. And yet, she is a cute child. But you are our pride, you know, and to me—well, let me take you home tonight, and I'll tell you about my pride."

"I don't care for your pride, if you all admire the cute child." Jo withdrew her hand from his. "Here comes Thaine now. I think you'd better take Leigh home. Thaine will take me, I'm sure. But I'll go to refreshments with you," she added, for she knew how to play on more than one string.

"Why, Josephine, my queen, my queen, where are you hiding? I've danced an extra, waiting for you. Todd Stewart, I'll have to kill you yet tonight. What do you mean by breaking up my party?"

Thaine caught Jo's arm and with a mock thrust at Todd he whirled her into the house.

"Did you really miss me?" Jo's big dark eyes were fastened on Thaine's face. "More than tongue can tell. Who wouldn't miss you?" Thaine's eyes were shining mischievously.

"Leigh Shirley wouldn't," Jo said softly and half sadly.

Something impenetrable dropped before Thaine's face.

"Let's go out to the honeysuckle arbor and not dance now. I'm so tired," Jo murmured, with a sweet pleading in her voice.

"I fixed it just for you," Thaine declared as he led the way to the moonlit lawn and shadowy seat.

"You are so good to me, Thaine. What makes you do so many things just for me? I know you don't really care for me. You are so different from most farmers' sons." Jo's head drooped a little and she put one hand on his arm.

"I can't help being good to folks. It's just the angel in me," Thaine declared. Then he added seriously, "I wish I could do something for you, Jo. All the boys are wild about you tonight. You are a picture."

She was beautiful at the moment, and as she lifted her eyes to his something in their shining depths spoke witchingly to the youth of nineteen, untrained in ways of feminine coquetry. He was only a country boy, unskilled in social tactics, but a combination of timidity and good breeding shaped his ideals and his action.

"I don't care for all the boys," Jo murmured.

"Then we are hopelessly bankrupt," Thaine declared. "Isn't this a wonderful night?"

"Yes, and father and mother are going home so early," Jo said.

"Well, your whole wardrobe is over here; why not stay all night? You can help Rosie and mother and me tomorrow. There are plenty of Benningtons left at your home without you, and mother will want you," Thaine urged.

"Do you want me to?" Jo asked softly.

"Tremendously. We'll eat all the ice cream that's left when the crowd goes and have the empty mansion all to ourselves," Thaine declared.

"We are to dance the last dance together too," Jo reminded him.

"Let's run in now. The crowd doesn't miss me, but I'm host, you know, and they're gasping for you. They'll be scouring the premises if we wait longer."

As Thaine lifted Jo to her feet there was a glitter of tears in her bright eyes. And because the place was shadowy and sweet with honeysuckle perfume, and the moonlight entrancing, and Jo was very willing, and tears are ever appealing, he put his arm around her and drew her close to him, and kissed her on each cheek.

Jo's face was triumphant as they met Leigh Shirley at the dining room door.

"What's the next case on docket, Leigh?" Thaine asked, dropping Jo's arm.

Jealousy has sharp eyes, but even jealousy could hardly have found fault with the friendly and indifferent look on Thaine's face.

"Why, it's my first with you, Leigh. Who's your partner, Jo?" Thaine continued.

Two or three young men claimed the honor, and the music began.

"Mrs. Aydelot, Thaine has asked me to stay all night," Jo said, as the figures were forming.

"It will please us all," Virginia said graciously, and Jo tripped away.

When the strains of music for the last dance began Jo looked for Thaine, but he was nowhere to be found. She waited impatiently and the angry glitter in her eyes was not unbecoming her imperious air.

Bo Peep did not wait long, for he was getting tired. Half a dozen young men rushed toward Jo as she stood alone. But Todd Stewart let no opportunity escape him. And the dance began. A minute later Thaine came in with Leigh Shirley. Smiling a challenge at Todd, he caught Leigh's hand and swung into the crowd on the floor.

The older guests were already gone. The music trailed off into a weird, rippling rhythm, with young hearts beating time to its melody and young feet keeping step to its measure. Then the tired, happy company broke into groups. Good-bys and good wishes were given again and again, and the party was over.

The couples took their way up or down the old Grass River trail or out across the prairie by-roads, with the moon sailing serenely down the west. Everybody voted it the finest party ever given on Grass River. And nobody at all, except his mother and Jo Bennington, noticed that Thaine had not left Leigh Shirley's side from his first dance with her late in the evening until the time of the good-bys.

As the guests were leaving Thaine turned to Jo, saying:

"I'm sorry about that last dance, but I'll forgive Todd this last time. Rosie cut her hand on a glass tumbler she dropped and I was helping Leigh to tie it up when old Bo Peep started the music. Here's the girl I'm to take home. Got your draperies on already. The carriage waits and the black steed paws for us by the chicken yard gate. Good-night, gentle beings." And taking Leigh's arm, he led her away.

"Gimpke is as awkward as a cow," Jo Bennington declared, "and too stupid to know what's said to her."

But Rosie Gimpke, standing in the shadows of the darkened dining room, was not too stupid to understand what was said about her. And into her stolid brain came dreams that night of a fair face with soft golden brown hair and kindly eyes of deep, tender blue. Stupid as she was, the woman's instinct in her told her in her dreams that the handsome young son of her employer might not always look his thoughts nor dance earliest and oftenest with the girl he liked best. But Rosie was dull and slept heavily and these things came to her sluggish brain only in fleeting dreams.

Thaine and Leigh did not hurry on their homeward way. And Jo Bennington, wide awake in the guest room of the Aydelot house, noted that the moon was far toward the west when Thaine let himself in at the side door and slipped up stairs unheard by all the household except herself.

"Let's go down by the lake," Thaine suggested as he and Leigh came to the edge of the grove. "It's full to the bridge, and the lilies are wide open now. Are you too sleepy to look at them? You used to draw them with chalk all along the blackboard in the old schoolhouse up there."

"I'm never too sleepy to look at water lilies in the moonlight," Leigh replied, "nor too tired to paint them, either. Lilies are a part of my creed. 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'"

"With their long rubbery stems, up out of mud mostly," Thaine said carelessly. "I pretty nearly grew fast along with them down there, till I learned how to gather them a better way."

The woodland shadows were thrust through with shafts of white moonbeams, giving a weird setting to the silent midnight hour. The odor of woods' blossoms came with the moist, fresh breath of the May night. There was a little song of waters gurgling down the spillway that was once only a dry draw choked with wild plum bushes. The road wound picturesquely through the grove to a bridged driveway that separated the lakelet into two parts. A spread of silvery light lay on this driveway and Thaine checked his horse in the midst of it while the two looked at the waters.

"It's all just silver or sable. There's no middle tone," Leigh said, looking at the sparkling moonbeams reflected on the face of the lake and the darkness of the shadowed surface beyond them.

"Isn't there pink, or creamy, or something softer in those lilies right by the bank? I'm no artist, but that's how it looks to a clod-hopper," Thaine declared.

"You are an artist, or you wouldn't catch that, where most anybody would see only steely white and dead black. It is the only color in this black and white woodsy place," Leigh insisted, looking up at Thaine's face in the shadow and down at her own white dress.

"There's a bit of color in your cheeks," Thaine said, as he studied the girl's fair countenance, all pink and white in the moonlight.

"Oh, not the pretty blooming roses like Jo Bennington has," Leigh said, smiling frankly and folding her hands contentedly in her lap.

Thaine recalled the seat under the honeysuckle, and Jo Bennington's pleading eyes, and bewitching beauty, and the touch of her hand on his arm, and her willingness to be kissed. He was flattered by it all, for Jo was the belle of the valley, and Thaine thought himself in love with her. He knew that the other boys, especially Todd Stewart, Jr., envied him. And yet in this quiet hour in the silent grove, with the waters shimmering below them, the gentle dignity of the sweet-faced girl beside him, with her purity and simplicity wrapping her about, as the morning mists wrapped the far purple notches on the southwest horizon, gave to her presence there an influence he could not understand.

Thaine had never kissed any girl except Jo, had never cared enough for any other girl to think about it. But tonight there suddenly swept through his mind the thought of the joy that was waiting for some man to whom Leigh would give that privilege, and without any self-analysis (boys at nineteen analyze little) he began to hate the man who should come sometime to claim the privilege.

"Leigh, don't you ever feel jealous of Jo?" He didn't know why he asked the question.

Leigh gave a little laugh.

"Ought I?" she inquired, looking up. "She hasn't anything I want."

The deep violet eyes under the long lashes were beautiful without the flashing and sparkle of Jo Bennington's coquettish gaze.

"That was an idiotic thing to ask," Thaine admitted. "Why should you, sure enough?"

"I wish I had some of those lilies." Leigh changed the subject abruptly.

"Hold the horse, then, and I'll get them. I keep a hooked knife on a long stick hidden down here on purpose to cut them for me mummy, on occasion."

Thaine jumped out of the buggy and ran down to the end of the driveway where the creamy lilies lay on the dark waters near the bank.

"Be careful of your dress," he said, as he came back and handed a bunch of blossoms with their trailing wet stems up to Leigh. "Do you remember your Prince Quippi off in China, and your love letters, with old Grass River for postal service? Will you send me a letter down the old Kaw River when I go to the Kansas University this fall?"

"A sunflower letter like I used to send to Quippi?" Leigh asked.

"Any kind of a letter. I'll miss you more than anything here, except my beloved chores about the farm," Thaine responded.

"Jo will write all the letters you'll have time to answer," Leigh asserted.

"Oh, she says she's going to Lawrence too, if her pa-paw is elected County Treasurer. We'll be in the University together. You'll just have to write to me, Leighlie."

"Not unless you go to China. I'll send you a letter there like I used to send to Prince Quippi." There was a sudden pathos in her tone.

"Will you? Oh, Leigh, will you?" Thaine asked, gaily, looking down into her face, white and dainty in the soft light. "Quippi never answered one of them, but I would if I was over there, and I may go yet. There's no telling."

Leigh looked up with her eyes full of pain.

"Why, I didn't mean to tease you," Thaine declared.

"Thaine, Pryor Gaines is to start to China tomorrow. He's been planning it for weeks and weeks. He's going to be a missionary and he'll never come back again—and—and there is so much for me to do when he is gone. He has been such a kind helper all these years. His refined taste has meant so much to me in the study of painting, and I need him now."

Thaine gave a low whistle of surprise. Leigh's eyes were full of tears, but Thaine would not have dared to take her in his arms, as he had taken Jo Bennington.

"Little neighbor, we've been playmates nearly all our lives. Can't I help you in some way?" he asked gently.

"Yes, you can," Leigh replied in a low voice. "There are some things I must do for Uncle Jim and when you are doing for people you can't tell them nor depend on their advice. When Pryor is gone, may I ask you sometimes what to do? I won't bother you often."

Asher Aydelot had declared that Alice Leigh was the prettiest girl in Ohio in her day.

The pink-tinted creamy lilies looking up from the still surface of the lakelet were not so fair as the pink-tinted face of Alice Leigh's daughter, framed in the soft brown shadows of her hair with a hint of gold in the ripples at the white temples. And behind the face, looking out through long-lashed violet eyes, was loving sacrifice and utter self-forgetfulness.

Thaine was nineteen and wise to give advice. A sudden thrill caught his pulse, mid-beat.

"Is that all? Can't I do something?" he asked eagerly.

"That's a great deal. And nobody can do for anybody. We have to do for ourselves."

"You are not doing anything for Uncle Jim, then, I am to understand," Thaine said.

But Leigh ignored his thrust, saying:

"When Pryor leaves, he doesn't want to say good-by to anybody, not even to Uncle Jim. He says China is only a little way off, just behind the purple notches over there. I'm going to take him to the train tomorrow and then I'm going on to Wykerton on business. After that, I may need lots of advice."

"Wykerton's a joint-ridden place, but John Jacobs has put a good class of farmers around it. He's such an old saloon hater, Hans Wyker'd like to kill him. But say, why not tell me now what you are about, so I can be looking up references and former judicial decisions handed down in similar cases?" Thaine asked lightly.

"Because it's too long a story, and I must get Pryor to the eight o'clock limited," Leigh said.

The crowing of chickens in a far away farmyard came faintly at that moment, and Thaine with a strange new sense of the importance of living, sent the black horses cantering down the trail to the old Cloverdale Ranch house.

Jo Bennington slept late. She had been up late. She had danced often and she had waited for Thaine's homecoming. Yet, when she came downstairs in a white morning dress all sprinkled with little pink sprays, there was hardly a hint of weariness in her young face or in her quick footsteps.

"I'm glad you stayed, Jo," Mrs. Aydelot greeted her. "This is 'the morning after the night before,' and, as usual, the desertions equal the wounded and imprisoned. Asher and the men had to go across the river early to look after the fences and washouts on the lower quarter. And Rosie Gimpke decided to go home this morning as soon as breakfast was done. So it is left for us to get the house over the party. Not so easy as getting ready for it, especially without help."

"Where's Thaine?" Jo asked carelessly, though her face was a tattler.

"He took some colts over to John Jacobs' ranch. He had Rosie ride one and he rode another and led two. They were a sight. I hoped you might see them go by your window. Thaine had his hat stuck on like a Dutchman's and he puffed himself out and made up a regular Wyker face as he jogged along. And Rosie plumped herself down on that capering colt as though she shifted all responsibility for accidents upon it. The more it pranced about, the firmer she sat and the less concerned she was. I heard Thaine calling out, 'Breakers ahead!' as he watched her bring it back into the road in front of him with a sort of side kick of her foot."

"What made Gimpke leave?" Jo asked, to cover her disappointment.

"She cut her hand badly last night. She insisted at first that she would help me today and go home later to stay till it gets well. Then she suddenly changed her mind. Possibly it was the spare-room bed," Virginia said laughing. "When I told her not to wake you when she made up the other beds, she suddenly got homesick, her hand grew worse and she flew the premises. I'll run up and attend to that bed while you finish your breakfast," and Virginia left the room.

At that moment young Todd Stewart appeared on the side porch before the dining room door.

"Thaine stopped long enough to ask me to come over and move furniture for his mother," Todd sang out. "He doesn't think you were made to lift cupboards and carry chairs downstairs."

"Oh, it's his mother he's thinking about," Jo said with pretty petulance. In truth, she was angry with Thaine for taking Leigh home last night and for leaving home today.

"No, it's his mother he's ceased to love," Todd said, coming inside. "He said he'd quit the old home and was moving his goods up to Wolf Creek for keeps. And with that fat tow-headed Gimpke girl sitting on the frisky bay colt as unconcerned as a bump on a log, it was the funniest sight I ever saw."

Jo tossed her head contemptuously.

"Say, Curly Locks, Curly Locks, you ought to always sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and wear a dress to breakfast with those little pink du-dads scattered over it."

"Not if I was a farmer's wife," Jo responded quickly.

"Oh, Jo, do you really want to be a city girl?" Todd's face was frankly sorrowful. "Could you never be satisfied on a farm?"

"I don't believe I ever could," Jo said prettily.

"Thaine's a farmer all right, Jo."

"He isn't going to be one always," Jo broke in quickly. "He's going to the Kansas University and there's no telling after that."

"No, he's just going to Wykerton, that's all. Nay, he have went. Him and him fraulein. And say, there's another pretty fraulein went up the trail just ahead of the Aydelot horse party. A sweetheart of a girl whom Thaine Aydelot took home after all last night."

"I don't care where Thaine goes," Jo cried.

"And you don't care for a farmer anyhow," Todd said suavely.

"Oh, that depends on how helpful he is," Jo responded tactfully.

Todd sprang up and began to fling the chairs about with extravagant energy in his pretense of being useful.

"Let's help Mrs. Aydelot as swift as possible. It's hot as the dickens this morning, and the prognostics are for a cyclone before twelve hours. It's nearly eleven of 'em now. I'll take you home when we are through. Thaine isn't the whole of Grass River and the adjacent creeks and tributaries and all that in them is."



CHAPTER XV

THE COBURN BOOK

And I see, from my higher level, It is not the path but the pace That wearies the back, and dims the eye, And writes the lines on the face. —Margaret E. Sangster.

Meanwhile the May sunshine beat hot upon the green prairie, and the promised storm gathered itself together behind the horizon where the three headlands were lost in an ash-colored blur. Wykerton, shut in by the broken country about Big Wolf Creek, was more uncomfortable than the open prairie. And especially was it uncomfortable in the "blind tiger" of the Wyker eating-house.

Today the men of the old firm of Champers & Co. were again holding a meeting in this little room that could have told of much lawless plotting if walls could only tell.

"It's danged hot in here, Wyker. Open that window," Darley Champers complained. "What kept you fellows so long, anyhow?"

"Business kep' me, and Smith here, he stop to peek at a pretty girl for goot as ten minute," Hans Wyker said jocosely.

Champers stared at Thomas Smith, whose small eyes gleamed back at him.

"Oh, I just turned to look at Miss Shirley in the dining room. Can't a man look at a pretty girl if he is past forty-five? She didn't see me, though."

"Naw, she see nopotty but young Aydelot sitting mit her. Why you take oop precious time peekin' trough der crack in der kitchen door? I be back in a minute vonce. Smitt haf business mit you," Wyker declared as he turned to the kitchen again.

Left together, the two men sat silent a moment. Then Champers said with a frown:

"What do you want now? We've got no business with each other except as I am agent for your rents and mortgages."

"You seem to fatten on them, or something," Smith answered insinuatingly. "You lose no flesh with the years, I see."

"I've little occasion to worry," Darley Champers replied meaningly.

"Not with a fat income like yours and small returns to your employer who's kept you all these years," Smith began, but Darley Champers mentally blew up. It was in the bluffer's game that he always succeeded best.

"Now, see here, dang you. Get to business. You and Wyker and me dissolved partnership long ago. I've been your agent years and years. I've did my best. I never got so rich you could notice it on my breath. I'm not a thief nor a murderer. I keep inside the law. I broke with you fellows years ago, except straight contract that'll probate in any court. You are a bully in power and a coward out of it. What the devil do you want with me? I'm no bank. Be clear and quick about it and quit your infernal dodgin' human beins like a cut-throat. I've signed your name to no end of papers for you when you wouldn't put your own left-handed writin' in sight. I have your written permit safe for doin' it. I reckon somebody must a' put that right hand of yours out of commission sometime. I'll find out about it one of these days myself."

Thomas Smith sat looking at the speaker with steady gaze. Many lines crossed his countenance now, but the crooked scar had not faded with time. In a coffin his would be the face of an old man. Alive, it was so colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a man in hard lines financially.

"I want money and I want it quick, or I'd not come clear out here. And you are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I've held grown to weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley's at the last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him. He'll never own a quarter again," Smith spoke composedly.

"Yes, I guess you're right. You've done him to his ruin. Jacobs has a mortgage on his home, too, and a Jew's a Jew. He'll close on Jim with a snap yet. It won't be the first time he's done it," Darley Champers declared.

"And that niece, Tank's girl, he was to protect for Alice Leigh?" Smith asked.

"Oh, eventually she'll either marry some hired man, I reckon, or go to sewin' or something like it for a livin'. She's a danged pretty girl now, but girls fade quick," Champers said.

For just one instant something like remorse swept Smith's face. Then he hardened again as the ruling passion asserted itself.

"Serves her right," he said in a tone so brutal that Champers remembered it.

"But I tell you I must have money. Two hundred dollars tonight and fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And you'll get it for me. You understand that. And listen, now." Smith's voice slowly uncoiled itself to Champers' senses as a snake moves leisurely toward a bird it means to draw to itself. "You say you have signed my name for me and transacted business, handling my money. If you care to air the thing in court, I'm ready for you anytime. But do you dare? Well, bring me two hundred dollars before tomorrow and the other fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And after this look out for yourself."

The threat in the last words was indescribable, and Champers would have shuddered could he have seen Smith's countenance as he left the room.

"So he taunts me with being a coward and a brute, a thief and a cut-throat; dares to strike me in the face when I've given him a living so long he's forgotten who did it. I'm done with him. But he don't dare to say a word."

He shut his lips tightly and slowly clinched his hands.

"For wy you stare so at dat door yet? Where's Champers?" Hans Wyker demanded as he came in.

"The game's between us two now," Thomas Smith declared, turning to Hans Wyker.

And a grim game was plotted then and there. Hans, who had been a perpetual law-breaker since the loss of his brewery business, had let his hatred of John Jacobs grow to a virulent poison in his system. While Thomas Smith, whose character Darley Champers had read truly, followed so many wrong paths down the years that conscience and manhood were strangers to him. From being a financier he had dropped to the employment of a brewers' association. His commission was to tempt young men and boys to drink; to create appetites that should build up the brewing business for the future. In the game now, Smith was to deliver beer and whisky into Wyker's hands. Wyker would do the rest. Whoever opposed him must suffer for his rashness.