It was cooler in the large dining-room where Thaine Aydelot and Leigh Shirley had met by chance at noontime. Leigh's face wore a deeper bloom and her eyes were shining with the exciting events of the day: the going of Pryor Gaines and the business that had brought her to Wykerton. Something like pain stabbed suddenly into Thaine Aydelot's mind as he caught sight of her, a surprise to find how daintily attractive she was in her cool summer gown of pale blue gingham and her becoming hat with its broad brim above her brown-gold hair.

"I didn't expect to find you here," Leigh said as Thaine took the chair opposite her at the little table.

"I came over to Little Wolf with Rosie Gimpke and some other colts. Then I walked over here to catch a ride to Careyville, if I could," Thaine said carelessly.

"You can ride with me if you want to. I'll be going soon after dinner," Leigh suggested.

"Oh, I'll want to all right. It may be well to start early. It's so hot I expect there'll be a storm before night," Thaine suggested, wondering the while what Leigh's business in Wykerton might be.

Darley Champers was in a fever when he came from his conference with Thomas Smith. Smith had played large sums into his hands in the first years of their partnership. Of late the sums had all gone the other way. But Champers was entangled enough to know that he must raise the money required, and the land was the only asset. Few things are more difficult to accomplish than to find a buyer for what must be sold.

At the office Leigh was waiting for him. "Mr. Champers, I am Leigh Shirley from the Cloverdale place on Grass River," she said, looking earnestly up at him.

Darley Champers was no ladies' man, but so far as in his coarse-grained nature lay, he was never knowingly rude to a woman, and Leigh's manner and presence made the atmosphere of his office comfortingly different from the place he had just quitted. The white lilac bush in the yard behind the office whose blossoms sent a faint odor through the rear door, seemed to double its fragrance.

"Sit down, madam. I'm pleased to meet you. Can I be of any service to you today?" he said with bluff cordiality.

"Yes, sir. I want to buy the quarter section lying southeast of us. It was the old Cloverdale Ranch once. It belongs to Champers & Co. now, the records show, and I want to get it. It was my Uncle Jim Shirley's first claim."

Darley Champers stared at the girl and said nothing.

"What do you ask for it?" Leigh inquired.

Still the real estate dealer was silent.

"Isn't it for sale? It is all weed-grown and hasn't been cultivated for years."

The tremor in the girl's voice reached the best spot in Darley Champers' trade-hardened heart.

"Lord, yes, it's for sale!" he broke out.

A sense of relief at this sudden opportunity, combined with the intense satisfaction of getting even with Thomas Smith, overwhelmed him. Smith would rave at the sale to a Shirley, yet this sale had been demanded. Champers had written Smith's name into too many documents to need the owner's handwriting in this transaction. Smith would leave town in the evening. The whole thing was easy enough. While Leigh waited, the real humaneness of which Champers so often boasted found its voice within him.

"I'll sell it for sixteen hundred dollars if I can get two hundred down today and the rest in cash inside of two weeks. But I must close the bargain today, you understand."

He had fully meant to make it seventeen hundred fifty dollars. It was the unknown humane thing in him that cut off his own commission.

"It's worth it," he said to himself. "Won't Thomas Smith, who's got no name to sign to a piece of paper, won't he just cuss when it's all did! It's worth my little loss just to get something dead on him. The tricky thief!"

"I'll take it," Leigh said, a strange light glowing in her eyes and a firm line settling about her red lips.

Champers couldn't realize an hour later how it was all done, nor why with such a poor bargain for himself he should feel such satisfaction as he saw Leigh Shirley and Thaine Aydelot driving down the road toward Little Wolf together. Neither could he understand why the perfume of white lilac blossoms from the bush in the back yard of his office should seem so sweet this morning. He was not a flower lover. But he felt the two hundred dollars of good money in his pocket and chuckled as he forecasted the hour of Thomas Smith's discovery.

"This is a shadier road than the one I came over this morning," Leigh said as she and Thaine followed the old trail toward Little Wolf Creek.

"It's a little nearer, too, and you'll see by casting a glimpse westward that things are doing over Grass River way," Thaine replied.

Leigh saw that a sullen black cloud bank was heaving above the western horizon and felt the heated air of the May afternoon.

"I don't like storms when I'm away from home," she said.

"Are you afraid, like Jo Bennington? She has the terrors over them. We were out once when she nearly bankrupted everything, she was so scared."

Thaine recalled a stormy night when Jo had clung to his arm to the danger of both of them and the frightened horse he could hardly control.

"No, I'm not afraid. I just don't like being blown about. I am glad I happened to find you, to be blown about, too, if it's necessary," Leigh replied.

"'Happened' is a good word, Leigh. You happened on what I managed you should, else that long circus performance with Mademoiselle Rosella Gimpkello, famous bareback rider, had not been put on the sawdust this hot day."

"What are you saying, Thaine Aydelot?" Leigh asked.

"You said last night you were coming over here today and that after you had come you might need my advice. Me for the place where my advice is needed ever, on land or water. Rosie's hand isn't fit to use yet. I knew that was a nasty glass cut, so I met her in the hall upstairs early this morning and persuaded her to come over today. It gave me the excuse I wanted—to get here by mere happening."

"And leave Mrs. Aydelot all the cleaning up to do. Humane son!" Leigh exclaimed.

"Oh, Jo stayed all night, and I stopped at Todd Stewart's place and persuaded him down to help mother and Jo. It wasn't hard work to get him persuaded, either."

"Aren't you jealous of Todd?" Leigh asked, with a demure curve of her lip.

"Ought I be? He hasn't anything I want," Thaine retorted.

"No, he's a farmer. Some folks don't like farmers."

"I don't blame them," Thaine said thoughtlessly. "I haven't much use for a farm myself. But Leigh, am I an unnecessary evil? I really turned 'Rory Rumpus' and 'rode a raw-boned racer' clear over here just to be ready to help you. I wish now I'd stayed home and dried the knives and forks and spoons for my mammie."

"Oh, Thaine, you are as good as—as alfalfa hay, and I need you more today than I ever did in my life before."

"And I want to help you more than anything. Don't be a still cat, Leighlie. Tell me what you are up to."

They had reached the steep hill beyond the Jacobs sheep range where the narrow road with what John Jacobs called "the scary little twist" wound down between high banks to a shadowy hollow leading out to the open trail by the willows along Big Wolf. At the break in the bank, opening a rough way down to the deep waters of Little Wolf, a draught of cool air swept up refreshingly against their faces. Thaine flattened the buggy top under the shade of overhanging trees and held the horse to the spot to enjoy the delightful coolness. They had no such eerie picture to prejudice them against the place as the picture that haunted John Jacobs' mind here.

"I've bought a ranch, Thaine; the quarter section that Uncle Jim entered in 1870," Leigh said calmly.

"Alice Leigh Shirley, are you crazy?" Thaine exclaimed.

"No, I'm safe and sane. But that's why I need your advice," Leigh answered.

Something in the girl's appealing voice and perfect confidence of friendship, so unlike Jo Bennington's pouting demands and pretty coquetry, came as a revelation and a sense of loss to Thaine. For he loved Jo. He was sure of that, cock-sure.

"It's this way," Leigh went on, "you know how Uncle Jim lost everything in the boom except his honor. He's helped everybody who needed help, and everybody likes him, I guess."

"I never knew anybody who didn't," Thaine agreed.

"So many things, I needn't name them all, bad crops, bad faith on the part of others, bad luck and bad judgment and bad health, for all his size, have helped till he is ready to go hopeless, and Uncle Jim's only fifty-one. It's no time to quit till you're eighty in such a good old state as Kansas," Leigh asserted. "Only, big as he is, he's not a real strong man, and crumples down where small nervy men stand up."

"Well, lady landlord, how can I advise you? You are past advising. You have already bought," Thaine said.

"You can tell me how to pay for the ranch," Leigh declared calmly. "I bought of Darley Champers for sixteen hundred dollars. I paid two hundred down just now. I've been saving it two years; since I left the high school at Careyville. Butter and eggs and chickens and some other things." She hesitated, and a dainty pink tint swept her cheek.

Why should a girl be so deliciously fair with the bloom of summer on her cheeks and with little ringlets curling in baby-gold hair about her temples and at her neck, and with such red lips sweet to kiss, and then put about herself a faint invisible something that should make the young man beside her blush that he would even think of being so rude as to try to kiss her.

"And you paid how much?" Thaine asked gravely.

"Two hundred dollars. I want to borrow fourteen hundred more and get it clear away from Darley Champers. I'm sure with a ranch again, Uncle Jim will be able to win out," Leigh insisted.

"What's on it now?" Thaine asked.

"Just weeds and a million sunflowers. Enough to send Prince Quippi such a message he'd have to write back a real love letter to me," Leigh replied.

"Leighlie, you can't do it. You might pay interest maybe, year in and year out, the gnawing, wearing interest. That's all you'd do even with your hens and butter. Don't undertake the burden."

"I've already done it," Leigh declared.

"Throw it up. You can't make it," Thaine urged.

"I know I can," Leigh maintained stoutly.

"You can't."

"I can."

"How?" Thaine queried hopelessly.

"If I can get the loan—"

"Which you can't," Thaine broke in. "Any man on Grass River will tell you the same, if you don't want to believe the word of a nineteen-year-old boy."

"Thaine, I must do something. Even our home is mortgaged. Everything is slipping out from under us. You don't know what that means."

"My father and mother knew it over and over." Thaine's face was full of sympathy.

"And they won out. I'm not so foolish after all. When they came out here, they took the prairies as Nature had left them, grass-covered and waiting. I'm taking them as the boom left them, weed-covered and waiting. I'll earn the interest myself and make the land pay the principal and I know exactly how it will do it, too."

"Tell me how," Thaine demanded.

"It's no dream. I got the idea out of a Coburn book last winter," Leigh replied.

"You mean the State Agricultural Report of Secretary Coburn? Funny place to hunt for inspiration; queer gospel, I'd say," Thaine declared. "Why didn't you go to the census report of 1890, or Radway's Ready Relief Almanac, or the Unabridged Dictionary?"

"All right, you despiser of small things. It was just an agricultural report full of tables and statistics and comparative values and things that I happened on one day when things were looking blackest, and right in the middle I found a page that Foster Dwight Coburn must have put in just for me, I guess. There was a little sketch of an alfalfa plant with its long good roots, and just one paragraph beside it with the title, 'The Silent Subsoiler.'"

"That sounds well," Thaine observed. He was listening eagerly in spite of his joking, and his mind was alert to the girl's project.

"Mr. Coburn said," Leigh went on, "that there are some silent subsoilers that do their work with ease and as effectually as any plow ever hitched, and the great one of these is alfalfa; that it is a reservoir of wealth that takes away the fear of protest and over-draft."

"Well, and what if Coburn is right?" Thaine queried.

"Listen, now. I planned how I'd get back that old claim of Uncle Jim's; how I'd pay some money down and borrow the rest, and begin seeding it to alfalfa. Then I'll churn and feed chickens and make little sketches of water lilies, maybe, and pay the interest and let the alfalfa pay off the principal. I haven't any father or mother, Thaine; Uncle Jim is all I have. He hasn't always been successful in business ventures, but he's always been honest. He has nothing to blush for, nothing to keep hidden. I know we'll win now, for that writing of Foster Dwight Coburn's is true. Don't try to discourage me, Thaine," she looked up with shining eyes.

"You are a silent little subsoiler yourself, Leigh, doing your work effectually. Of course you'll win, you brave girl. I wish it was a different kind of work, though."

A low peal of thunder rolled up from the darkening horizon, and the sun disappeared behind the advancing clouds.

"That's our notice to quit the premises. I shouldn't want to ford Little Wolf in a storm. It is ugly enough any time and was bank full when I took Rosie Posie over this morning. And say, her mother's got a face like a brass bedstead."

Thaine was lifting the buggy top as he spoke. Suddenly he exclaimed:

"Oh, Leigh, look down yonder."

He pointed down the little rift toward the water.

"Where?" Leigh asked, looking in the direction of his hand.

"Across the creek, around by the side of that hill. That's the Gimpke home stuck in there where you'd never think of looking for a house from up here. They can see anybody that goes up this lonely hill and nobody can see them. If I was gunning for Gimpkes, I'd lie in wait right here," Thaine declared.

"Maybe, if the Gimpkes were gunning for you, they could pick you off as you went innocently up this Kyber Pass and you'd never know what hit you nor live to tell the tale; and they so snugly out of sight nobody but you would ever have sighted them," Leigh replied. "But let's hurry on. It will be cooler on the open prairie than down there along the creek trail. And if we are storm-stayed, we are storm-stayed, that's all."

"You are the comfortablest girl a fellow could have, Leighlie. You aren't a bit scared of storms like—"

"Yes, like Jo. I can't help it. I never was much of a 'fraid cat, but I don't mind admitting I am fonder of water in lakes and rivers and water-color drawings than thumping down on my head from the little end of a cyclone funnel."

The air grew cooler in their homeward ride, while they followed the same old Sunflower Trail that Asher and Virginia Aydelot had followed one September day a quarter of a century before. And, for some reason, they did not stop to question, neither was eager to reach the end of the trail today.

As they came to a crest of the prairie looking down a long verdant slope toward what was now a woodsy draw, Thaine said, "Leigh, my mother was lost here somewhere once and Doctor Carey found her. Maybe Doctor Carey is the man to help you now."

"Oh, Thaine, I believe I could ask Doctor Carey for anything. You are so good to think of him," Leigh exclaimed. "I knew you'd help me out."

"Yes, I'm good. That's my trade," Thaine replied. "And I'm pretty brave to offer advice, too. But if you want to talk any about courage, mine's a different brand from yours. I may be a soldier myself some day. Brother Aydelot of the Sunflower Ranch, trustee of the Grass River M. E. Church, fit, bled, and died in the Civil War and was not quite my age now when he came out all battle-scoured and gory. I always said I'd be a soldier like my popper. But I'd fall in a dead faint before that alfalfa and mortgage business you face like a hero. It's getting cooler. See, the storm didn't get this side of the purple notches; it stayed over there with Pryor Gaines and Prince Quippi."

They rode awhile in silence, then Thaine said: "Leigh, I will go up to Careyville and send Doctor Carey down to Cloverdale to see you. It will save you some time at least, and I'll tell him you want to see him particularly and alone. You can tell me the result Sunday if you want to."

Leigh did not reply, but gratitude in the violet eyes made words unnecessary.

On the Sabbath after the party, Thaine Aydelot waited at the church door for Jo Bennington, who loitered out slowly, chatting the while with Todd Stewart.

"Let me take you home, Jo. I see your carriage will be full with the company you will have today," Thaine said.

Jo looked with a pretty pout at the invited guests gathered about her mother and father waiting for her at the family carriage.

"Thank you, yes. I am glad to get away from those tiresome goody-goodies. It looks like the Benningtons are taking the whole official board and the 'amen corner' home for dinner."

"Then come to the Sunflower Inn and dine with me. Rosie Gimpke came back last night and she promised me shortcake and sauerkraut and pretzels and schooners of Grass River water. Do come."

Indeed, Thaine had been most uncomfortable since the day at Wykerton, and he wanted to be especially good to Jo now. He didn't know exactly why, nor had he felt any jealousy at the bright looks and the leisure preference she had just given to Todd Stewart.

"Oh, you are too good. Yes, I'll go, of course," Jo exclaimed. "Can't we go down to the grove and see the lilies this afternoon, too?"

"Yes, we can go to China if we want to," Thaine declared. "Wait here in the shade until I drive up."

Teams were being backed away from the hitching-rack, and much chatting of neighbors was everywhere. Jim Shirley was not at church today, and Jo saw Leigh Shirley going alone toward the farther end of the rack where her buggy stood, while three or four young men were rushing to untie her horse. Jo, turning to speak to some neighbors, did not notice who had outdistanced the others in this country church courtesy until she realized that the crowd was going, and down the deserted hitching line Leigh Shirley sat in her buggy talking with Thaine, who was standing beside it with his foot on the step, looking up earnestly into her face.

Jo was no better pleased that Leigh's face was like a fair picture under her white hat, and she felt her own cheeks flushing as she saw how cool and poised and unhurried her little neighbor appeared.

"Thank you, Thaine. All right. Don't forget, then," Jo heard her say as she gathered up the reins, and noted that it was her motion and not the young man's that cut short the interview.

"Leigh is a leech when she has the chance," Jo said jokingly, as the two sat in the Aydelot buggy at last.

When one has grown up from babyhood the ruling spirit in a neighborhood, her opinions are to be accepted.

Thaine gave Jo a quick look but said nothing.

"By the way, papa says Jim isn't very well this summer. Says he still grieves over the farm he lost. Leigh hasn't much ahead of her, nailed down to a chicken lot and a cow pasture and a garden. I wonder they don't move to town. She'd get a clerkship, maybe."

Thaine only waited, and Jo ran on.

"I'd never stay in the country a minute if I could get to town. I'll be glad when papa's elected treasurer, so we can live in Careyville again. Poor Leigh. Doesn't she look like a drudge?"

Still Thaine was silent.

"Why don't you say something?" Jo demanded, looking coquettishly at him.

"About what?" he asked gravely.

"About Leigh. I don't want to do all the gossiping. Tell me what you think of her."

"It would take a Cyclopedia Britannica set of volumes to do that," Thaine replied.

"Oh, be serious and answer my questions," Jo demanded.

"'Doesn't she look like a drudge?' What kind of an answer—information or just my opinion?"

"Oh, your opinion, of course," Jo said.

"If she looks like a drudge, it's what she is." The young man's eyes were on his team.

"I thought you liked her," Jo insisted.

"I do," Thaine replied.

"How much, pray?"

"I haven't measured yet."

Thaine Aydelot was by inheritance a handsome young fellow, and as he turned now to his companion, something in his countenance gave it a manliness not usual to his happy-go-lucky expression. But the same unpenetrable something beyond which no one could see was always on his face when Jo talked of Leigh.

"How much do you like me?" The query was daringly put, but the beauty of the girl's striking face seemed to warrant anything from her lips, however daring.

"A tremendous lot, I know that," Thaine replied quickly, and Jo dropped her eyes and began to chatter of other things.

In the afternoon the cool grove was inviting, and Thaine and Jo loitered about in careless enjoyment of woodland shadows and wind-dimpled waters and Sabbath quiet and one another.

"I want father to have a little boathouse over by the lily corner and make a picnic place here sometime," Thaine said as they sat by the lake in the late afternoon.

"Such a nice place for you to come in the summer. Aren't you glad you don't just have to stay in the country?" Jo asked.

"Would you never be satisfied in the country, Jo?" Thaine queried. "Not if you had a home there?"

Jo blushed and her face was exquisite in its rich coloring.

"Would you be?" she asked.

"Oh, I'd like to do something worth while," Thaine replied. "Father doesn't say much, but he wants me here, I know."

"He will get over it, I'm sure," Jo insisted. "Why should the first generation here weight us all down here, too? I hope you'll not give up to your father. I wouldn't," Jo said defiantly.

"Did you ever give up to him?" Thaine asked.

"No, he gives up to me." The words were too sweetly said to seem harsh.

"I don't blame him," Thaine added.

"I don't believe any of our crowd will stay here like the old folks have done, except Todd Stewart and, of course, Leigh," Jo declared.

"Say, Jo, my folks don't look old to me. Mummie is younger and good-lookinger than anybody, except—"

"Leigh Shirley," Jo broke in.

Thaine looked at his watch without replying.

"Is it late? You must take me home, now," Jo said. "You'll be over tonight, won't you? We will have some company from Careyville who want to meet you."

"I'm sorry, but I promised Leigh up here at church that I'd go over to Cloverdale for a little while tonight."

Thaine could not tell Jo of Leigh's affairs, and he felt that the Shirleys' intimacy with his father's family and his own expressed admiration and attention to Jo were sufficient to protect him from jealousy. Jo stiffened visibly.

"Thaine Aydelot, what's the reason for your actions—Oh, I don't care. Go to Shirley's, by all means. Everybody to his likes," she cried angrily.

"Well, that's my rathers for tonight, and I can't help it," Thaine answered hotly.

"Of course you can't. Let's go home quick so you can get off early," Jo said in an angered tone.

"I'll go as slowly as I can. You can't get rid of me so." Thaine was getting control of himself again.

"Say, Thaine, tell me why you go away from our company tonight," Jo pleaded softly, putting her hand on her companion's arm. "Don't you care to come to our house any more?"

They were in the buggy now on the driveway across the lake. Thaine recalled the moonlight hour when he sat with Leigh, of how little Leigh seemed to be thinking of herself, of how he had admired her because she demanded no admiration from him. Was there an obligation demanded here today? And had he given grounds for such obligation? Past question, he had.

"Jo, you must take me just as I am," he said. "All the boys are ready to crowd into any place I vacate around Cyrus Bennington's premises. You won't miss one from your company tonight. I may get desperate—and kill off a few of them sometime to make you really miss me."

He knew he was talking foolishly. He had felt himself superior to the other young men who obeyed every wish of Jo's. He had been flattered always by her evident preference for his company, and had not thought of himself as being controlled by her before. He had been too willing to do her bidding. Today, for the first time, her rule was irksome. In spite of his efforts to be agreeable, the drive homeward was not a happy one.

It was twilight when Thaine reached the Cloverdale Ranch and found Leigh waiting for him on the wide porch. All the way down the river he had been calling himself names and letting his conscience stab him unmercifully. And once when something spoke within him, saying, "You never told Jo you were fond of her. You have not done her any wrong," he stifled back the pleasing voice and despised himself for trying to find such excuse. He was only nineteen and had not had the stern discipline of war that Asher Aydelot had known at the same age.

Jo had offered no further complaint at his refusing her invitation. She played the vastly more effective part of being grieved but not angry, and her quiet good-by was so unlike pretty imperious Jo Bennington that Thaine was tempted to go back and spend the evening in her company. Yet, strangely enough, he did not blame Leigh for being the cause of his discomfort, as he should have done. As he neared her home, his conscience grew less and less noisy, and when he sat at last in Jim Shirley's easy porch chair with Leigh in a low rocker facing him, while the long summer Sabbath twilight was falling on the peaceful landscape about him, he had almost forgotten Jo's claim on him.

"Doctor Carey came down to see me," Leigh was saying, "just as you were kind enough to ask him to do. He told me he had no money of his own to loan, but he knew of a fund he might control in a few days. He had to leave Kansas yesterday on a business trip, but he will see me as soon as he comes back."

"Better than gold! Your plans just fall together and fit in, don't they?" Thaine exclaimed. "Will he be back in time, though?"

"Yes. But really, Thaine," Leigh's eyes were beautiful in the twilight, "I never should have thought of Doctor Carey if it hadn't been for you."

"I am of some use to the community after all," Thaine said with serious face.

"You are a great deal of use to me," Leigh assured him.

"Oh, anybody else could do all I do for you," he retorted.

"But I wouldn't ask anybody else," the girl replied.

"Not even my mother? She thinks there is no girl like you this side of heaven, or Virginia, anyhow, and she'd have taken it up with father," Thaine declared.

"I thought of her," Leigh answered, "but in things like this, it is impossible. You said yourself that no man on Grass River would think it a wise plan. Your father won his fight out here, even his fight against the boom. We have a different wilderness to overcome, I guess. Mine is reclaiming that Cloverdale ranch from the Champers Company and the weeds. I don't know where your battlefield lies, but you'll have it, and it's because you haven't won yet that I can come to you. You have helped me and you always will."

"I'm glad you came to me, anyhow," Thaine assured her.

They sat awhile looking out at the prairies and the line of the river glistening in the gloaming. A faint pink tone edged some gray cloud flakes in the southwest sky and all the scene was restful in the soft evening light.

At last Thaine said thoughtfully: "I haven't heard the bugle trumpet for my call to battle yet. Maybe I'll find out down at the University and make everybody proud of me some day as I am proud of you in your fight for a weed-covered quarter of prairie soil. Jo Bennington is always ridiculing country life, and yet she's pretty fond of Todd Stewart, who is more of a farmer every day."

A little smile curved the corners of Leigh's mouth, and Thaine knew her thoughts.

"You are not a bit alike, you two girls," he exclaimed.

"Does it make any difference? There's only one of a kind of anything in this world, flower or fruit or leaf or life," Leigh added. "I found that out in painting. There's only one Jo, and one Pryor Gaines, and one Jane Aydelot as I remember her back in Ohio; one anything or anybody."

"And only one Leigh in all the world."

It was not the usual bantering tone now, and there was something in the expression of Thaine's handsome face; something looking out from his dark eyes that Leigh did not see, because she was looking out at the lights and shadows of evening.

The sunset's afterglow had thrown a splendor far up the sky. In its reflected light, softened by twilight shadows, Leigh made a picture herself that an artist might love to paint.

She turned away at his words, and a quiver of pain swept her face as Thaine leaned toward her eagerly.

"Oh, Leigh, I wasn't joking. You are so unlike anybody else." He broke off suddenly. But Leigh was herself again and, smiling frankly, she added, "Let's count our blessings, then, and be thankful it's no worse."

Thaine rose at once.

"I must be going. It is after eight and I ought to be at Bennington's now. I am so glad, I am so honored, to have your confidence. Won't you keep telling me your plans, and if I can help you, will you let me do it?"

He had taken Leigh's hand in good-by and held it as he put the question.

"I'll be so glad to have your help, for we will see things alike, not as the older people see for us. It is only at our age that we dare take risks. Your father and Uncle Jim wouldn't come to Kansas now if it were now like it was when they were twenty-one."

Thaine did not release her hand.

"I'm glad there is only one Leigh," he said softly.

The light of his eyes and the sympathetic tone seemed all unlike the heir of the Sunflower Ranch, yet very much like the spirit of the father who had wrested it from the wilderness, and the mother who had courageously shared his every need.

"I don't know tonight where my wilderness lies. But I hope, little girl, I hope I'll fight as good a battle on my frontier as my father has done—as you are doing. Good-night."

He hurried away and, falling into the gay company at Bennington's, was welcomed by Jo as a penitent, and abundantly forgiven.

While down at Cloverdale, Leigh Shirley sat long alone, looking with unseeing eyes at the twilight into which he had vanished.



CHAPTER XVI

THE HUMANENESS OF CHAMPERS

What is the use of trying to make things worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things. —The Light That Failed.

On the third day after Darley Champers had closed with Leigh Shirley, Horace Carey walked into his office.

"Hello, Champers, how's business?" he asked, with the cheerful way that drew even his enemies to him.

"Danged bad!" Champers replied. "Rotten world is full of danged fools who want money and ain't satisfied when you get it for 'em."

"Have you made such a sale lately?" Carey inquired.

"Yes; day before yesterday," Champers replied.

"Was it the old Jim Shirley quarter, the Cloverdale Ranch?" the doctor asked.

"The very place, and I'm in a devil of a fix, too," Darley Champers declared. "The trouble is I'm dead sure I'll not get the other fourteen hundred."

Thomas Smith had been paid the two hundred dollars and had fully released the land to Champers to finish the sale. Unfortunately for Champers, Smith still hung about Wykerton, annoying his agent so much that in a fit of anger, Champers revealed the fact that Leigh Shirley was the buyer of the Cloverdale Ranch. Smith's rage was the greater because he did not believe the price money could be paid by a girl without resources, and against this girl he was not now ready to move. The burden of the whole matter now was that Darley Champers had taken his life in his own hands by the deal. The bulldog in Champers was roused now, and, while he was a good many things evil, he was not a coward.

But for his anger this morning, he would hardly have been so free in answering Doctor Carey's query. Carey was a living rebuke to him, and no man loves that force anywhere.

"I tell you, I'm in a devil of a fix," he repeated.

"Well, be wise and go to a doctor in time," Doctor Carey said, only half in jest. "Champers, we haven't always worked together out here, but I guess we know each other pretty well. I'm willing to trust you. Are you afraid to trust me?"

Darley Champers leaned back in his office chair and stared at the questioner.

Horace Carey's heavy hair was very white now, although he was hardly fifty-five years old. The decades of consecrated service to his profession had told only in this one feature. His face was the face of a vigorous man, and something in his life, maybe the meaning of giving up and the meaning of the service, he once told Jim Shirley, he had known, had left upon his countenance their mark of strength. As Darley Champers looked at this face, he realized, as he had never done before, the freedom and joy of an unsullied reputation and honest dealing.

"Lord, no, I'd trust you in hell, Doc," he exclaimed bluntly.

"I won't put it to the proof," the doctor assured him. "Nor will I trouble you nor myself with any matter not concerning us two. Tell me frankly all the trouble about this sale."

Briefly, Champers explained Smith's hatred of Jim Shirley, and his anger at the present sale.

"All I ask is that you will not break your word to Miss Shirley," Horace Carey said. "I happen to know that the money will be ready for you. This Smith is the same man who came to old Carey's Crossing years ago, of course?"

"Why, do you remember him?" Darley Champers asked in surprise.

"I've crossed his trail a hundred times since then, and it's always an ill-smelling trail. Some day I may follow it a bit myself. You'll do well to break with him," the doctor assured him.

"If Doc Carey ever starts on that hyena's trail, I'd like to be in at the end of the chase," Champers declared with a grin.

"Why not help a bit yourself? I'm going East for a week. When I come back, I'll see you. Maybe I can help you a little to get his claws unhooked from your throat," Carey suggested, and the two men shook hands and separated.

Champers stood up and breathed deeply. The influence of an upright man's presence is inspiring. Horace Carey did not dream that his confidence and good will that day were turning the balances for Darley Champers for the remainder of his life. Champers was by nature a ferret, and Carey's parting words took root and grew in his mind.

The May rains that had flooded Grass River and its tributaries did worse for Clover Creek in Ohio a few days later. The lower part of the town of Cloverdale was uncomfortably submerged until the high railroad grade across the creek on the Aydelot farm broke and let the back water have broader outlet.

Doctor Carey had not startled the same old loafers who kept watch over the railway station when he suddenly dropped into the town again. They were too busy watching the capers of Clover Creek to attend to their regular post of duty. And since he had been a guest of Miss Jane Aydelot as much as a half dozen times in two decades, they knew about what to expect of him now.

They were more interested in a big bluff stranger who dropped into town off the early morning train, ate a plentiful meal at the depot restaurant, and then strolled down to the creek. He loitered all day about the spot where the grade broke, nor did he leave the place when the crowd was called away late in the afternoon to a little stream on the other side of town that had suddenly risen to be a river for the first time in the memory of man.

To Doctor Carey, Jane Aydelot looked scarce a day older for the dozen years gone by. Her days were serene and full of good works. Such women do not lose the charm of youth until late in life.

"I have come for help, as you told me to do when I took Leigh away," Doctor Carey said as they sat on the south veranda in the pleasant light of the May evening.

Jane Aydelot's face was expectant. Nobody except Doctor Carey knew how a little hungry longing in her eyes disappeared when he made his brief visits and crept back again when he said good-by.

"I am waiting always to help you," she replied.

"I need fourteen hundred dollars to loan to Leigh, and I must have that sum at once."

Miss Jane looked thoughtfully at the deep woodland, hiding the marshes as of old.

"I can arrange it," she said presently. "Tell me about it."

And Horace Carey told her all of Leigh's plans.

"It is a wonderful undertaking for a girl, but she has faith in herself, and if she fails, the land is abundantly worth the mortgage with nothing but weeds on it," the doctor explained. "She is a charming girl. She seems to have inherited all of her mother's sweetness and artistic gifts, without her mother's submissiveness to others; and from her father, she has keen business qualities, but fails to inherit his love of gain and traits of trickery. Her executive mind with her uncle's good heart make a winning team. By the way, my affection for Jim Shirley is leading me to make some quiet investigation of an agent of Tank's who is hounding Jim and will, I suppose, turn against Leigh. Can you help me at all?"

Doctor Carey had always felt that Miss Jane knew much more than she cared to tell of the Shirley family's affairs.

She rose without replying and went into the house. In a few minutes she returned and gave a large sealed envelope into Doctor Carey's hands.

"Do not use that until it is needed to protect someone from Tank Shirley's violence. It is legally drawn and witnessed. You will find it effective if it is needed at all."

"I have one more duty, Miss Aydelot," Doctor Carey said. "My time is brief. I have an intuition, too, that I may never come East again."

Jane Aydelot's face whitened, and her hands closed involuntarily on one another as she waited.

"I must have you and Asher Aydelot reconciled. What can I tell him of you?"

The pink flush returned to the pale cheeks.

"Let him read my will. I copied it when I had your telegram two days ago. I cannot give him my property; Uncle Francis' will forbids it. But—take the copy with you. I hope my wishes will be realized."

Doctor Carey held her hand long when he bade her good-by. In her clear gray eyes he read a story that gave him infinite sorrow. Stooping down, he put his arm gently about her shoulders and, drawing her to him, kissed her once on her forehead, and once—just once—on her lips, and was gone.

They never met again. But those who knew her best in Cloverdale remember yet that from the Maytime of that year, Miss Jane's face was glorified with a light never there before.

Down at the creek, Doctor Carey saw a large man intently studying the bank beyond the break in the railroad grade. Something made the doctor pass slowly, for the figure appealed to his interest. Presently, the man turned away and, climbing up to the National pike road before him, made his way into town. As the last light of evening fell full upon him, it revealed to Doctor Carey a very white face, and eyes that stared, as if seeing nothing—even the bluff face and huge form of Darley Champers.

Two weeks later when Darley Champers gave Leigh Shirley the deed in her own name to the Cloverdale Ranch, he said, in his bluff way:

"I'm sayin' nothin' against Jim Shirley, madam, when I say I hope you'll keep this in your own name. Some day you'll know why. And I hope to Gawd you'll prosper with it. It's cost more'n the money paid out for it to get that quarter section of prairie out of the wilderness. Sorrow and disappointment, bad management, and blasted hopes, and hard work, and hate. But I reckon it's clean hands and a pure heart, as the Good Book says, that you are usin' now. This money don't represent all it'll cost me yet by a danged sight."

He bade her a hearty good-by and strode away.

The mortgage for the loan was given to Horace Carey, as agreed upon between himself and Miss Jane Aydelot.

"If Leigh knows it's Aydelot money she might feel like she's taking what should be Thaine's. Would the Aydelots feel the same if they knew it?" Miss Jane had asked.

"The thing the Aydelots have never grieved for is this Ohio inheritance," Carey answered her. "Asher gave it up to live his life in his own way. If you knew what a prince of a fellow he is, although he's only a Kansas farmer, you would understand how that prairie ranch and the lure of the sunflower have gripped him to the West,"

The day after the completion of the sale Dr. Carey went to the Big Wolf neighborhood. In the dusk of the evening he drove up to Darley Champers' office in Wykerton. As he was hitching his team Rosie Gimpke rushed out of the side street and lunged across to the hitching post.

"Oh, Doctor Carey, coom queek mit me," she exclaimed in a whisper. "Coom, I just got here from Mis' Aydelot's. They mak' me coom home to work at the Wyker House, ant a man get hurt bad in there. Coom, do coom," she urged in a frenzy of eagerness.

"What's the trouble?" Dr. Carey asked.

"Coom. I show you. I 'fraid the man coom back and finish heem. Don't make no noise, but coom." Rosie was clutching hard at Dr. Carey's arm as she whispered.

"That sounds surprising, but life is full of surprises," the doctor thought as he took up his medicine case and followed Rosie's lead.

The way took them to the alley behind the Wyker House, through a rear gate to the back door of the kitchen, from which it was a short step to the little "blind tiger" beyond the dining room. Sounds of boisterous talking and laughter and a general shuffling of dishes told that the evening meal was beginning. For her size and clumsiness Rosie whisked the doctor deftly out of sight and joined the ranks of the waiters in the dining room.

The only light inside the little room came from the upper half of the one window looking toward the alley. As it was already twilight the doctor did not get his bearings until a huge form on the floor near the table made an effort to rise.

"What's the trouble here?" Carey asked in the sympathetic-professional voice by which he controlled sick rooms.

"Lord, Doc, is that you?" Darley Champers followed the words with a groan.

"You are in a fix," Carey replied as he lifted Champers to his feet.

Blood was on his face and clothes and the floor, and Champers himself was almost too weak to stand.

"Get me out of here as quick as you can, Doc," he said in a thick voice.

At the same moment Rosie Gimpke appeared from the kitchen.

"Slip him out queek now. I hold the dining room door tight," she urged, rushing back to the kitchen.

Carey moved quickly and had Darley Champers safely out and into his own office before Rosie had need to relax her grip on the dining room door-knob.

"I guess you've saved me," Champers said faintly as the doctor examined his wounds.

"Not as bad as that," Dr. Carey replied cheerfully. "An ugly scalp wound and loss of blood, but you'll come back all right."

"And a kick in the abdomen," Champers groaned. "But it was from what was comin' you saved me. I've never been sick a day in my life and I've had little sympathy for you and your line, and then to be knocked down so quick by a little whiffet like Smith and roll over like a log at the first blow!"

"You're in luck. Most men in your line ought to have been knocked down a good many times before now," the doctor declared. "How did this happen?"

"I settled with Smith and made him sign everything up to a hog-tight contract. Then he started in to abuse me till I got tired and told him I'd just got back from Ohio and a thing or two I saw there. Then he suddenly belted me and, against all rules of the game, kicked me when I was down, and left me, threatening to come back and finish me. That's what you saved me from."

"Champers, my old buggy is like a rocking chair. Let me take you home with me for a few days while you are wearing patches on your head," Horace Carey suggested.

Darley Champers stared at his helper in surprise. Then he said slowly:

"Say, Doc, I've hated you a good many years for doin' just such tricks for folks. It was my cussedness made me do it, I reckon. I'd like to get out of town a little while. That joint of Wyker's has seen more'n one fellow laid out, and some of 'em went down Big Wolf later, and some of 'em fell into Little Wolf and never come out. It's a hole, I tell you. And Smith is a devil tonight."

On the homeward way Dr. Carey said quietly:

"By the way, Champers, I saw you at Cloverdale, Ohio, last week."

Champers did not start nor seem surprised as he replied:

"Yes, I seen you, but I didn't want to speak to nobody right then."

"No?" Dr. Carey questioned.

"No. I've got hold enough of Smith now to make him afraid of me if I'd turn loose. I'd a made money by doin' it, too. Good clean money. That's why he's gettin' good and drunk to beat me up again tonight, maybe."

"Well, why don't you tighten up on him? Why let a scoundrel like that run free?" Carey inquired.

"Because it might drag Leigh Shirley's name into the muss. And I'm no devourer of widders and orphans; I'm a humane man, and I'll let Smith run till his tether snaps and he falls over the precipice and breaks his neck for hisself. Besides I'm not sure now whether he's a agent, representin' some principal, or the principal representin' hisself. And in that case I'd have to deal the cards different for him, and them he'd do harm to."

"You are a humane man, Champers," Carey declared. "I think I've hated you, too, a good many years. These gray hairs of ours ought to make us better behaved now. But, even if you do let Smith run, that 'blind tiger' of Wyker's must go out of business. I'll start John Jacobs after that hole one of these days. He holds the balance of power on public sentiment out here. He'll clear it out. His hatred of saloons is like Smith's hatred of Shirley, only it's a righteous indignation. I've heard John's father was a drunkard and his mother followed her husband into a saloon in Cincinnati to persuade him out and was killed by a drunken tough. Anyhow, John will break up that game of Wyker's one of these times. See if he doesn't."

Darley Champers slowly shifted his huge frame into an easier posture as he replied:

"Yes, he can do it all right. But mark me, now, the day he runs Hans Wyker out of that doggery business it will be good-by to John Jacobs. You see if it isn't. I wouldn't start him after it too quick."

Darley Champers spent two weeks with his physician, and the many friends of Dr. Carey smiled and agreed with Todd Stewart, who declared:

"Carey would win Satan to be his fast friend if the Old Scratch would only let Carey doctor him once."

But nobody understood how the awakening of the latent manhood in Darley Champers and his determination to protect an orphan girl were winning the doctor to him as well.



CHAPTER XVII

THE PURPLE NOTCHES

Two things greater than all things are. One is Love, and the other War. And since we know not how War may prove, Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love. —The Ballad of the King's Jest.

The summer ran its hot length of days, but it was a gay season for the second generation in the Grass River Valley. Nor drouth nor heat can much annoy when the heart beats young. September would see the first scattering of the happy company for the winter. The last grand rally for the crowd came late in August. Two hayrack loads of young folks, with some few in carriages, were to spend the day at "The Cottonwoods," a far-away picnic ground toward the three headlands of the southwest. Few of the company had ever visited the place. Distances are deceiving on the prairies and better picnic grounds lay nearer to Grass River.

On the afternoon before the picnic Leigh Shirley took her work to the lawn behind the house.

What most ranches gave over to weed patches, or hog lots, or dumping grounds along the stream, at Cloverdale had become a shady clover-sodded lawn sloping down to the river's edge. The biggest cottonwoods and elms in the whole valley grew on this lawn. A hedge of lilac and other shrubbery bordered by sunflowers and hollyhocks bounded it from the fields and trellises of white honeysuckle screened it from the road.



In a rustic seat overlooking the river and the prairies beyond, Leigh Shirley bent lovingly above a square of heavy white paper on which she was sketching a group of sunflowers glowing in the afternoon sunlight. Leigh's talent was only an undeveloped inheritance, but if it lacked training it's fresh originality was unspoiled.

"The top of the afternoon to you."

Leigh turned to see Thaine Aydelot looking down at her as he leaned over the high back of the rustic seat. He was in his working clothes with his straw hat set back, showing his brown face. His luminous dark eyes were shining and a half-teasing, half-sympathetic smile was on his lips. But whatever the clothes, there was always something of the Southern gentleman about every man of the Thaine blood. Something of the soldierly bearing of his father had been his heritage likewise.

"May I see your stuff, or is it not for the profane eyes of a thresher of alfalfa to look upon?"

Leigh drew back and held up her drawing-board.

"It's just like you, Leigh. You always were an artist, but when did you learn all the technique? Is that what you call it? How do you do it?"

"I don't know," Leigh answered frankly. "It seems to do itself."

"And why do you do it? Or why don't you do more of it?" Thaine asked.

The girl answered, smiling:

"Just between us two, I hope to do a piece good enough to sell and help to lift the price of alfalfa seed a bit."

"By the way, I brought the first load of seed over just now. Where's Uncle Jim?" Thaine asked, trying not to let the pity in his heart show itself in his eyes.

"Uncle Jim is breaking sod—weeds, I mean—for fall sowing. Wait a minute and I'll get you the money he left for you."

Thaine threw himself down in the shade beside Leigh's seat while she went into the house.

"I wish I didn't have to take that money, but I know better than to say a word," he said to himself. "Thank the Lord, the worried look is beginning to leave Uncle Jim's face, though. How could any of us get along without Uncle Jim?"

"What little seed to be worth so much, but it's the beginning of conquest," Leigh said as Thaine took the bills from her hand. "And it's a much more hopeful business to reclaim from booms and weeds than from this lonely old prairie as it was when Uncle Jim and your father first came here."

"It's just the same old pioneer spirit, though, and you are fighting a mortgage just like they fought loneliness, and besides, Asher Aydelot had Virginia Thaine to help him to keep his courage up."

A sudden flush deepened on his ruddy cheeks and he continued:

"Of course you are going to the picnic? You'll have to start early. It's a goodish way to 'The Cottonwoods.' The Sunflower Ranch needs my talents, so I can't go with the crowd, but I may draggle in about high noon. I'll drive over in the buggy, and I'll try to snake some pretty girl off the wagons to ride home with me when it's all over."

"Maybe the pretty girls will all be preempted before you get there," Leigh replied.

"I know one that I hope won't be," Thaine said.

Leigh was bending over her drawing board and did not look up for a long minute. It was her gift to make comfort about her while she followed her own will unflinchingly. The breeze had blown the golden edges of her hair into fluffy ripples about her forehead and the deep blue of August skies was reflected in her blue eyes shaded by their long brown lashes. Thaine sat watching her every motion, as he always did when he was with her.

"Well?" Leigh looked up with the query. "And what's to hinder your getting the pretty girl you want if she understands and you are swift enough to cut off the enemy from a flank movement?"

"The girl herself," Thaine replied.

"Serious! Tragical! Won't you give me that chrome-yellow tube by your elbow there?" Leigh reached for the paint and their hands met.

"Say, little Sketcher of Things, will you be missing me when I go to school next month? Or will your art and your ranch take all your thoughts?"

"I wish they would, but they won't," Leigh said. "They will help to fill up the time, though."

"Leigh, may I bring you home tomorrow night? I'm going away the next day, and I won't see you any more for a long time."

"No, you may not," Leigh replied, looking up, and her sunny face framed by her golden brown hair was winsomely pleasing.

"Why not, Leigh? Am I too late?"

"Too early. You haven't asked Jo and been refused yet. But you are kind to put me on the 'waiting list.'"

Thaine was standing beside her now.

"I mean it. Has anybody asked you specially—to be your very particular escort?"

"Oh, yes. The very nicest of the crowd." Leigh's eyes were shining now. "But I've refused him," she added.

"Who was it?"

"Thaine Aydelot, and I refused because it was good taste for me to do it. If it's his last day at home—and—oh, I forget what I was going to say."

"I wish you wouldn't make a joke of it, anyhow. Tell me why you are so unkind to an old neighbor and lifelong pal," Thaine insisted.

But Leigh made no reply.

"Leigh!"

"Tell me why you insist when by all the rules you are due to snake the prettiest girl in the crowd off the wagon and into your buggy. Why aren't you satisfied to make the other boys all envy you?" Leigh had risen and stood beside the rustic seat, her arm across its high back.

"Because it is the last time. Because we've known each other since childhood and have been playmates, chums, companions; because I am going one way and you another, and our paths may widen more and more, and because—oh, Leigh, because I want you."

He leaned against the back of the seat and gently put one hand on her arm.

The yellow August sunshine lay on the level prairies beyond the river. The shining thread of waters wound away across the landscape under a play of light and shadow. The clover sod at their feet was soft and green. The big golden sunflowers hung on their stalks along the border of the lawn, and overhead the ripple of the summer breezes in the cottonwoods made a music like pattering raindrops. Under their swaying boughs Leigh Shirley stood, a fair, sweet girl. And nothing in the languorous beauty of the midsummer afternoon could have been quite so pleasing without her presence there.

She looked down at Thaine's big brown hand resting against her white arm, and then up to his handsome face.

"It would only make trouble for, for everybody. No, I'm coming home with the crowd on the hayrack." She lifted her arm and began to pull the petals from a tiny sunflower that lay on the seat beside her.

"Very well." There was no anger in Thaine's tone. "Do you remember the big sunflower we found to send to Prince Quippi, once?"

"The one that should bring him straight from China to me, if he really cared for me?" Leigh asked.

"You said that one was to tell him that you loved him and you knew it would bring him to you. But he never came."

"It's a way my princes have of doing," Leigh said with a little laugh.

"If I were in China and you should send me a sunflower, I'd know you wanted me to come back."

"If I ever send you one you will know that I do," Leigh said. "Meantime, my prince will wear a sprig of alfalfa on his coat."

"And a cockle burr in his whiskers, and cerulean blue overalls like mine, and he'll drudge along in a slow scrap with the soil till the soil gets him," Thaine added.

"Like it got your father," Leigh commented.

"Oh, he's just one sort of a man by himself," Thaine declared. "A pretty good sort, of course, else I'd never have recommended him to be my father. Good-by. I'll see you across the crowd tomorrow."

He turned at once and left her.

"The Cottonwoods" was a picturesque little grove grown in the last decade about a rocky run down which in the springtime a full stream swept. There was only a little ripple over a stony bed now, with shallow pools lost in the deeper basins here and there. The grasses lay flat and brown on the level prairie about it. Down the shaded valley a light cool breeze poured steadily. Beyond the stream a gentle slope reached far away to the foot of the three headlands—the purple notches of Thaine Aydelot's childhood fancies.

The day was ideal. Such days come sometimes in a Kansas August. The young people of the Grass River neighborhood had made merry half of the morning in the grove, and as they gathered for the picnic lunch someone called out:

"Jo Bennington, where's Thaine Aydelot? Great note for him to disappear when this Charity Ball was executed mainly for him."

"Better ask Todd Stewart. He's probably had Thaine kidnaped for this occasion," somebody else suggested.

"I tried to do it and failed," Todd Stewart assented. "I don't need him in my business. He can start to school today if he wants to."

"Well, you don't want him to go, do you, Jo?"

"Oh, I don't care especially. I'm going away myself, but not to the University, but I'm not going till papa's elected," Jo replied.

"And if papa's defeated we stay home all winter, eh?" Todd questioned.

"That all depends," Jo replied.

"Of course it does. What is it, and who depends on it? Jo, I'll help you if you must defend yourself."

Thaine Aydelot bounced down from the rocky bank above into the midst of the company and became at once Jo's escort by common consent.

"Now life's worth living, Thaine's here. Let's have dinner," the boys urged.

It was not Leigh Shirley's fault that Thaine should be placed between her and Jo at the spread of good things to eat; nor Jo's planning that she should be between Thaine and Todd Stewart. But nobody could be unhappy today.

In the late afternoon the crowd strolled in couples and quartettes and groups up and down the picturesque place.

Thaine had been with Jo from the moment of his coming and Leigh was glad that she had not yielded to his request of the afternoon before. She had become a little separated from the company as she followed a trail of golden sunflowers down the edge of the wide space between the stream and the foot of the headlands towering far beyond it. The sun had disappeared suddenly and the gleam of the blossoms dulled a trifle. Leigh sat down on a slab of shale to study the effect of the shadow.

"Are you still looking for a letter that will bring Prince Quippi back?" Thaine Aydelot asked as he climbed up from the rough stream bed to a seat beside her.

"I'm watching the effect of sunshine and shadow on the sunflowers," Leigh replied.

"It will be all shadow if you wait much longer. The clouds are gathering now and we must start home."

"Then I must be going, too. It's a lovely, lazy place here, though. Some time I'm going to the top of those bluffs, away off there."

"Let's go up now," Thaine suggested.

"But it's too late. I mustn't keep the crowd waiting," Leigh insisted. "It's a stiff climb, too."

"I can drive up. I know a trail through the brush. Let me drive you up, Leigh. It won't take long. There's something worth seeing up there," Thaine insisted.

"Well, be quick, Thaine. We'll get into trouble if we are late," Leigh declared.

The trail up the steep slope twisted its way back and forth through the low timber that covered the sides of the bluffs, and the two in the buggy found themselves shut away in its solitary windings.

"What a shadowy road," Leigh said. "And see that cliff dropping down beyond that turn. How could there be such a romantic place out on these level plains?"

"It was my fairy land when I was a little tot," Thaine replied. "I came here long ago and explored it myself."

"I'd like to come here sketching sometime. See how the branches meet overhead. The odors from the bluffside are like the odors of the woodland back in the Clover valley in Ohio. I remember them yet, although I was so little when I left there," Leigh said, turning to Thaine.

He shifted the reins, and throwing his hat in the buggy before him he pushed back the hair from his forehead.

"Leigh, will you let me take you home? I didn't ask Jo after all. Todd wouldn't wait long enough for me to do that, as I knew well enough he wouldn't. Don't be mad at me. Please don't," he pleaded.

"Why, I'm glad if you really want me to go with you, but you shouldn't have staid away this morning."

"I did it on purpose. I knew Todd wouldn't let the chance slip—nor Jo neither, if I let him have it."

"You let him have it merely because you didn't want the chance today. Your kindness will be your undoing some day," Leigh said with a smile that took off the edge of sarcasm.

Thaine said nothing in response, and they climbed slowly to the top of the bluff and stood at last on the crest of the middle headland.

Below them lay "The Cottonwoods" and the winding stream whose course, marked by the dark green line of shrubbery, stretched away toward Grass River far to the southeast. To the westward a wonderful vista of level prairie spread endlessly, wherein no line of shrubbery marked a watercourse nor tree rose up to break the circle of the horizon. Over all this vast plain the three headlands stood as sentinels. In the west the sunlight had pierced a heavy cloudbank and was pouring through the rift in one broad sheet of gold mist from sky to earth. Purple and silver and burnt umber, with green and gray and richest orange, blended all in the tones of the landscape, overhung now by a storm-girdled sky.

"This prairie belongs mostly to John Jacobs now and it is just as it was when the Indians called it the Grand Prairie and the old Pawnees came down here every summer to hunt buffalo. Some day, soon, there will be a sea of wheat flowing over all that level plain," Thaine said.

"And up here a home with nothing to cut off a fragment of the whole horizon. Think of seeing every sunrise and every sunset from a place like this," Leigh said, her face aglow with an artist's love of beauty. "It's farther to China than I used to think when I dreamed of a purple velvet house decorated with gold knobs beyond these three headlands."

"I always did want to live on the Purple Notches," Thaine said reminiscently. "I'm glad we came up here today."

The sound of singing came faintly up from the valley far away.

"The crowd is mobilized. See the wagons crawling out of the grove and the civilians in citizens' clothes following in carriages," Thaine said as he watched the picnic party pushing out toward the eastward. "I'm so glad we aren't with them."

Leigh sat leaning forward, looking at the majestic distances lost in purple haze, overshadowed by purple clouds with gold-broidered edges of sunlight.

"The world is all ours for once. We see all there is of it and yet we are alone in it up here on the purple notches I used to dream about," she said softly.

Thaine leaned back in his buggy and looked at Leigh with the same impenetrable expression on his countenance that was always there when she was present.

"Leigh," he said at last, "if you didn't have Uncle Jim what would you do?"

"I don't know," the girl answered.

"I never knew one of the fellows who didn't like you, but you, you don't seem to care for any of them. Don't they suit you?" Thaine asked.

"Yes, but I can't think much about them."

"Why not?"

Leigh drew a long breath.

"Thaine, you have always been a good friend to me. Some day I'll tell you why."

"Tell me now," Thaine insisted gently.

Leigh looked up, a mist of tears in her violet eyes.

"Oh, little girl, forgive me. It's because—because," Thaine hesitated. "Because deep down where nobody ever knew I've loved you always, Leigh. I didn't know how much until the night of my party and the day we were at Wykerton."

"Thaine! Thaine! you mustn't say such things," Leigh cried, gripping her hands together. "You mustn't! You mustn't!"

"But I must, and I will," Thaine declared.

"Then I won't listen to you. You are a flirt. Not satisfied with making one girl love you, you want to make all of us care for you."

"I know what you mean. I thought I loved Jo. Then I knew I didn't, and I felt in honor bound to keep her from finding it out. But that's a dead failure of a business. You can't play that game and win. I've learned a good many things this summer, and one of them is that Todd Stewart is the only one who really and truly loves Jo, and she cares as much for him as she does for anybody."

"How do you know?" Leigh asked as she leaned back now and faced Thaine.

"Because she doesn't know herself yet. She's too spoiled by the indulgence of everybody and too pretty. She wants attention. But I found finally, maybe mother helped me a little, that if she has Todd's attention she's satisfied. More, she's comfortable. She was always on thorns with me. Isn't that enough about Jo?"

"Well?" Leigh queried.

"No, nothing is well yet. Leigh, let me go away to the University. Let me make a name for myself, a world-wide name, maybe, let me fight on my frontier line and then come back and lift the burden you carry now. I want to do big things somewhere away from the Kansas prairies, away from the grind of the farm and country life. Oh, Leigh, you are the only girl I ever can really love."

He leaned forward and took her hands in his own, his dark eyes, beautiful with the light of love, looking down into hers, his face aglow with the ambition of undisciplined youth.

"Let me help you," he pleaded.

"It is only sympathy you offer, Thaine, and I don't want sympathy. You said that game wouldn't win with Jo. Neither would it with me. I am happy in my work. I'm not afraid of it. The harder part is to get enough money to buy seed and pay interest, and Uncle Jim and I will earn that. I tell you the mortgage must be lifted by alfalfa roots just as Coburn's book says it will be."

There was a defiant little curve on her red lips and the brave hopefulness of her face was inspiring.

"Go and do your work, Thaine. Fight your battles, push back your frontier line, win your wilderness, and make a world-wide name for yourself. But when all is done don't forget that the fight your father and mother made here, and are making today, is honorable, wonderful; and that the winning of a Kansas farm, the kingdom of golden wheat, bordered round by golden sunflowers, is a real kingdom. Its sinews of strength uphold the nation."

"Why, you eloquent little Jayhawker!" Thaine exclaimed. "You should have been an orator on the side, not an artist. But all this only makes me care the more. I'm proud of you. I'd want you for my chum if you were a boy. I want you for my friend, but down under all this I want you for my girl now, and afterwhile, Leigh, I want you for my own, all mine. Don't you care for me? Couldn't you learn to care, Leigh? Couldn't you go with me to a broader life somewhere out in the real big world? Couldn't we come some time to the Purple Notches and build a home for just our summer days, because we have seen these headlands all our lives?"

Leigh's head was bowed, and the pink blooms left her cheeks.

"Thaine," she said in a low voice that thrilled him with its sweetness, "I do care. I have always cared so much that I have hoped this moment might never come."

Thaine caught her arm eagerly.

"No! no! We can never, never be anything but friends, and if you care more than that for me now, if you really love me—"the voice was very soft—"don't ask me why. I cannot tell you, but I know we can never be anything more than friends, never, never."

The sorrow on her white face, the pathos of the great violet eyes, the firm outline of the red lips told Thaine Aydelot that words were hopeless. He had known her every mood from childhood. She never dallied nor hesitated. The grief of her answer went too deep for words to argue against. And withal Thaine Aydelot was very proud and unaccustomed to being denied what he chose to want very much.

"Leigh, will you do two things for me?" he asked at length. The sad, quiet tone was unlike Thaine Aydelot.

"If I can," Leigh answered.

"First, will you promise me that if you want me you will send for me. If you ever find—oh, Leigh, ever is such a long word. If you ever think you can care enough for me to let me come back to you, you will let me know."

"When I send you the little sunflower letter Prince Quippi never answered you may come back," Leigh said lightly, but the tears were too near for the promise to seem trivial. "What is the other thing?"

"I want you just once to let me kiss you, Leigh. It's our good-by kiss forever. Hereafter we are only friends, old chums, you know. Will you let me be your lover for one minute up here on the Purple Notches, where the whole world lies around us and nobody knows our secret? Please, Leigh. Then I'll go away and be a man somewhere in the big world that's always needing men."

Leigh leaned toward him, and he held her close as he kissed her red lips. In all the stormy days that followed the memory of that moment was with him. A moment when love, in all its purity and joy, knew its first realization.

The next day Leigh Shirley made butter all the morning, and in the afternoon she tried to retouch her sketch of sunflowers as she had seen the shadows dull the brightness of their petals in the valley below the Purple Notches.

The same day Thaine Aydelot left home for the winter, taking the memory of the most sacred moment of his life with him out into the big world that is always needing men.



CHAPTER XVIII

REMEMBERING THE MAINE

The Twentieth Kansas was fortunate in opportunity, and heroic in action, and has won a permanent place in the hearts of a grateful people. —William McKinley.

The sunny plains of Kansas were fair and full of growing in the spring of 1898. The alfalfa creeping out against the weeds of the old Cloverdale Ranch was green under the April sunshine. The breezes sweeping down the Grass River Valley carried a vigor in their caress. The Aydelot grove, just budding into leaf, was full of wild birds' song. All the sights and sounds and odors of springtime made the April day entrancing on the Kansas prairies.

Leigh Shirley had risen at dawn and come up to the grove in the early morning. She tethered her pony to graze by the roadside, and with her drawing board on a slender easel she stood on the driveway across the lakelet, busy for awhile with her paints and pencil. Then the sweetness of the morning air, the gurgling waters at the lake's outlet, once the little draw choked with wild plum bushes, and the trills of music from the shimmering boughs above her head, all combined to make dreaming pleasant. She dropped her brushes and stood looking at the lake and the bit of open woodland, and through it to the wide level fields beyond, with the river gleaming here and there under the touch of the morning light.

She recalled in contrast the silver and sable tones of the May night when she and Thaine sat on the driveway and saw the creamy water lilies open their hearts to the wooing moonlight and the caressing shadows. It was a fairyland here that night. It was plain daylight now, beautiful, but real. Life seemed a dream that night. It was very real this April morning. The young artist involuntarily drew a deep breath that was half a sigh and stooped to pick up her fallen brushes. But she dropped them again with a glad cry. Far across the lake, in the leaf-checkered sunshine, Thaine Aydelot stood smiling at her.

"Shall I stay here and spoil your landscape or come around and shake hands?" he called across to her.

"Oh, come over here and tell me how you happened," Leigh cried eagerly.

Grass River people blamed the two years of the University life for breaking Thaine Aydelot's interest in Jo Bennington. Not that Jo lacked for admirers without him. Life had been made so pleasant for her that she had not gone away to any school, even after her father's election to office. And down at the University the pretty girls considered Thaine perfectly heartless, for now in his second year they were still baffled by his general admiration and undivided indifference toward all of them. His eager face as he came striding up the driveway to meet Leigh Shirley would have been a revelation to them.

"I 'happened' last night, too late to-wake up the dog," Thaine exclaimed. "I happened to run against Dr. Carey, who had a hurry-up call down this way, and he happened to drop me at the Sunflower Inn. He's coming by for breakfast at my urgent demand. This country night practice is enough to kill a doctor. His hair is whiter than ever, young as he is. He said he is going to take a trip out West and have a vacation right soon. I told him all my plans. You can tell him anything, you know. And, besides, I'm hoping he will beat me to the house this morning and will tell the folks I'm here."

"Doesn't your mother know you are here?" Leigh asked.

"Not yet. I wanted to come down early and tell the lake good-by. I have to leave again in a few hours."

The old impenetrable expression had dropped over his face with the words. And nobody knows why the sunshine grew dull and the birds' songs dropped to busy twittering about unimportant things.

"Do you always tell it good-by?" Leigh asked, because she could think of nothing else to say.

"Not always, but this time it's different. I'm so glad I found you. I should have gone down to Cloverdale, of course, if you hadn't been here, but this saves time."

A pink wave swept Leigh's cheek, but she smiled a pleasant recognition of his thoughtfulness.

"I've come home to say good-by because I'm going to enlist in the first Kansas regiment that goes to Cuba to fight the Spaniards. And I must hurry back to Lawrence."

"Oh, Thaine! What do you mean?"

Leigh's face was very white.

"Be careful!"

Thaine caught her arm in time to save the light easel from being thrown over.

"Don't look at me that way, Leigh. Don't you know that President McKinley has declared war and has called for one hundred and twenty-five thousand volunteers? Four or five thousand from old Kansas. Do you reckon we Jayhawkers will wait till one hundred and twenty thousand have enlisted and trail in on the last five thousand? It would be against all traditions of the rude forefathers of the Sunflower State."

"Has war really been declared? We haven't had the papers for nearly a week. Everybody is so busy with farm work right now."

Leigh stood looking anxiously at Thaine.

"Declared! The first gun has been fired. The call for volunteers has come from Washington, and the Governor has said he will make Fred Funston Colonel of the first regiment of Kansas volunteers, and he sent out his appeal for loyal Kansas men to offer themselves. I tell you again, Leigh Shirley, I'll not be the one hundred and twenty-five thousandth man in the line. I'm going to be right close up to little Fred Funston, our Kansas boy, who is to be our Colonel. I have a notion that University students will make the right kind of soldiers. There will be plenty of ignorance and disloyalty and drafting into line on the Spanish side. America must send an intelligent private if the war is to be fought out quickly. I'm that intelligent gentleman."

"But why must we fight at all, Thaine? Spain has her islands in every sea. We are almost an inland country. Spain is a naval power. Who ever heard of the United States being a naval power? I don't understand what is back of all this fuss." Leigh asked the questions eagerly.

"We fight because we remember the Maine," Thaine said a little boastfully. "We are keeping in mind the two hundred and sixty-six American sailors who perished when our good ship was sunk in the harbor at Havana last February. If we aren't a naval power now we may develop some sinews of strength before we are through. Your Uncle Sam is a nervy citizen, and it was a sorry day for proud old Spain when she lighted the fuse to blow up our good warship. It was a fool's trick that we'll make Spain pay dearly for yet."

"So it's just for revenge, then, for the Maine horror. Thaine, think how many times worse than that this war might be. Isn't there any way to punish Spain except by sending more Americans to be killed by her fuses and her guns?" Leigh insisted.

"There is more than the Maine affair," Thaine assured her. "You know, just off our coast, almost in sight of our guns, Spain has held Cuba for all these centuries in a bondage of degradation and ignorance and cruel oppression. You know there has been an awful warfare going on there for three years between the Spanish government and the rebels against it. And that for a year and a half the atrocities of Weyler, the Captain General of the Spanish forces, make an unprintable record. The United States has declared war, not to retaliate for the loss of the Maine alone, awful as it was, but to right wrongs too long neglected, to put a twentieth century civilization instead of a sixteenth century barbarity in Cuba."

Thaine was reciting his lesson glibly, but Leigh broke in.

"But why must you go? You, an only child?"

She had never seen a soldier. Her knowledge of warfare had been given her by the stories Jim Shirley and Dr. Carey had told to her in her childhood.

"It's really not my fault that I'm an only child. It's an inheritance. My father was an only child, too. He went to war at the mature age of fifteen. I'll be twenty-one betimes." Thaine stood up with military stiffness.

"Your father fought to save his country. You just want gold lace and a lark. War is no frolic, Thaine Aydelot," Leigh insisted.

"I'm not counting on a frolic, Miss Shirley, and I don't want any gold lace till I have earned it," Thaine declared proudly.

"Then why do you go?" Leigh queried.

"I go in the name of patriotism. Wars don't just happen. At least, that is what the professor at the University tells us. Back of this Spanish fuss is a bigger turn waiting than has been foretold. Watch and see if I am not a prophet. This is a war to right human wrongs. That's why we are going into it."

"But your father wants you here. The Sunflower Ranch is waiting for you," Leigh urged.

"His father wanted him to stay in Ohio, so our family history runs. But Mr. Asher heard the calling of the prairies. His wilderness lay on the Kansas plains, and he came out and drove back the frontier line and pretty near won it. At least, he's got a wheat crop in this year that looks some like success."

Thaine smiled, but Leigh's face was grave.

"Leighlie, my frontier is where the Spanish yoke hangs heavy on the necks of slaves. I must go and win it. I must drive back my frontier line where I find it, not where my grandfather found it. I must do a man's part in the world's work."

His voice was full of earnestness and his dark eyes were glowing with the fire of inspiration. By the patriotism and enthusiasm of the youth of twenty-one has victory come to many a battlefield.

"But I don't want you to go away to war," Leigh pleaded.

"You don't want me here."

Thaine let his hand rest gently on hers for a moment as it lay on top of the easel; then hastily withdrew it.

"Has your alfalfa struck root deep enough to begin to pull up that mortgage yet?" he inquired, as if to drop the unpleasant subject.

"Not yet," Leigh answered. "We make every acre help to seed more acres. It's an uphill pull. It's my war with Spain, you know. But I'm doing something with these little daubs of mine. I have sold a few pieces. The price wasn't large, but it was something to put against a hungry interest account. Some day I want to paint—"she hesitated.

"What?" Thaine asked.

Leigh was bending over her brushes and paints, and did not look up as she said with an effort at indifference:

"Oh, the Purple Notches. It is so beautiful over there."

Thaine bit his lips to hold back the words, and Leigh went on:

"Dr. Carey says Uncle Jim couldn't have held out long at general farming. But the Coburn book was right. The alfalfa is the silent subsoiler, and when the whole quarter is seeded we'll pull that mortgage up by the roots, all right."

She looked up with shining eyes, and Thaine took both of her hands in his, saying:

"I must tell you good-by now. Mother will know I am here and will be dragging the lake for me. This isn't like other good-bys. Of course, I may come back a Brigadier General and make you very proud of me, or I might not come at all, but I won't say that. Oh, Leigh, Leigh, may I tell you once more how dear you are to me? Will you promise again to send me the same message you sent to Prince Quippi when you want me to come back?"

"I will," Leigh replied in a low voice, and for that moment the grove became for them a holy sanctuary, wherein their words were sacred vows.

When Thaine reached home again, Dr. Carey was just leaving, and the way was prepared for the purpose of his own coming, as he had hoped it would be.

"I've a call to make across the river. I'll be back in time to take you up to catch the train. There's a feast of a breakfast waiting in there for you. I know, for I had my share of it. Good-by for an hour or two."

The doctor waved his hand to Thaine and drove away.

"So the wanderlust and spirit of adventure in the Aydelot blood got you after all," Asher Aydelot said as he looked across the breakfast table at his son. "It seems such a little while ago that I was a boy in Ohio, a foolish fifteen-year-old, crazy to see and be into what I've wished so often since that I could forget."

"But you don't object, Father?" Thaine asked eagerly.

Asher did not reply at once. A rush of boyhood memories flooded his mind, and as he looked at Virginia he recalled how his mother had looked at him on the day he left home to join the Third Ohio regiment nearly forty years ago. And then he remembered the moonlit night and his mother's blessing when he told of his longing for the open West, where opportunity hunts the man.

"No, Thaine," he answered gently at last. "All I ask is that you try to foresee what is coming in hardship and responsibility. Young men go to war for adventure mostly. The army life may make a hero of you, not by brevet nor always by official record, but a hero nevertheless in bravery where courage is needed, and in a sense of duty done. Or it can make a low-grade scoundrel of you almost before you know it, if you do not put yourself on guard duty over yourself twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. War means real hardship. It is in everything the opposite of peace. And this war foreshadows big events. It may lead you to Cuba or to the Orient. Our Asiatic squadron is ordered from Hong Kong. Dr. Carey tells me it is going to meet the Spanish navy in the Philippines. I thought I fixed the West when I came here as a scout and later a settler, and drove the frontier back with my rifle and my hoe. Is it possible your frontier is further westward still? Even across the Pacific Ocean, where another kind of wilderness lies?"

Into Asher's clear gray eyes, that for all the years had held the vision of the wide, pathless prairies redeemed to fruitfulness, there was a vision now of the big things with which the twentieth century must cope. The work of a generation younger than his own.

"Don't forget two things, Thaine, when you are fairly started in this campaign. First, that wars do not last forever. They jar the frontier line back by leaps, but after war is over the good old prairie soil is waiting still for you—acres and acres yet unredeemed. And secondly, while you are a soldier don't waste energy with memories. Fight when you wear a uniform, and dream and remember when the guns are cold. You have my blessing, Thaine, only remember the blessing of Moses to Asher of old, 'As your day so will your strength be.' But you must have your mother's approval too."

Thaine looked lovingly at his mother, and the picture of her fine face lighted by eyes full of mother love staid with him through all the months that followed. And all the old family pride of the Thaines of Virginia, all the old sense of control and daring was in her tone as she answered:

"You have come to a man's estate. You must choose for yourself. But big as the world is, it is too little for mothers to be lost in. You cannot find a frontier so far that a mother's love has not outrun you to it. Go out and win."

"You are a Trojan, mother. I hope I'll always be worthy of your love, wherever I am," her son murmured.

Two hours later, when Dr. Carey stopped for Thaine, Virginia Aydelot came down to his buggy. Her face was very white and her eyes were shining with heroic resolve to be brave to the last.

"Horace, you may be glad you have no children," she said, as they waited for Thaine and his father to come out.

"My life has had many opportunities for service that must make up for the lack of other blessings. It may have further opportunity soon. May I ask a favor of you?"

Virginia was not to blame that her heart was too full to catch the undertone of sorrow in Horace Carey's words as she replied graciously:

"Anything that I can grant."

"Life is rather uncertain—even with a good doctor in the community—"Dr. Carey's smile was always winning. "I have hoarded less than I should have done if there had been a Carey to follow me. There will be nobody but Bo Peep to miss me, especially after awhile. I want you to give him a home if he ever needs one. He has some earnings to keep him from want. But you and I are the only Virginians in the valley. Promise me!"

"Of course I will, always, Horace. Be sure of that."

"Thank you, Virginia. I am planning to start to California in a few days. I may be gone for several months. I'll tell you good-by now, for I may not be down this way again before I go."

Virginia remembered afterward the doctor's strong handclasp and the steady gaze of his dark eyes and the pathos of his voice as he bade her good-by. But she did not note these then, for at that moment Thaine came down the walk with his father, and in the sorrow of parting with her son she had no mind for other things.

Dreary rains filled up the first days of May. At Camp Leedy, where the Kansas volunteers mobilized on the old Fair Ground on the outskirts of Topeka, Thaine Aydelot sat under the shelter of his tent watching the water pouring down the canvas walls of other tents and overflowing the deep ruts that cut the grassy sod with long muddy gashes. Camp Leedy was made up mostly of muddy gashes crossed by streams of semi-liquid mud supposed to be roads. Thaine sat on a pile of sodden straw. His clothing was muddy, his feet were wet, and the chill of the cold rain made him shiver.

"Noble warfare, this!" he said to himself. "Asher Aydelot knew his bearing when he told me that war was no ways like peace. I wonder what's going on right now down at the Sunflower Ranch. The rain ought to fill that old spillway draw from the lake down in the woods. It's nearly time for the water lilies to bloom, too."

The memory of the May night two years before with Leigh Shirley, all pink and white and sweet and modest, came surging across his mind as a heavy dash of rain deluged the tent walls about him.

"Look here, Private Thaine Aydelot, Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, if you are going to be a soldier stop that memory business right here, except to remember what Private Asher Aydelot, of the Third Ohio Infantry, told you about guard duty twenty-six hours out of twenty-four. Heigh ho!"

Thaine ended with a sigh, then he shut his teeth grimly and stared at the unceasing downpour with unseeing eyes.

A noisy demonstration in the camp roused him, and in a minute more young Todd Stewart lay stretched at full length in the mud before his tent.

"Welcome to our city, whose beauties have overcome others also," Thaine said, as he helped Todd to rise from the mud.

"Well, you look good to me, whether I do to you or not," Todd declared, as he scraped at the muddy plaster on his clothing.

"Enter!" Thaine exclaimed dramatically, holding back the tent flaps. "I hope you are not wounded."

Todd limped inside and sat down on the wet straw.

"No, my company just got to camp. I was so crazy to see anybody from the short grass country that I made a slide your way too swiftly. I don't mind these clothes, for I'll be getting my soldier's togs in a minute anyhow, but I did twist that ankle in my zeal. Where's your uniform?" Todd asked, staring at Thaine's clothes.

"With yours, still. Make a minute of it when you get it, won't you?" Thaine replied. "Our common Uncle wants soldiers. He has no time to give to their clothes. A ragged shirt or naked breast will stop a Spanish bullet as well as a khaki suit."

"Do you mean to say you haven't your soldier uniform yet?" Todd broke in.

"A few of us have, but most of us haven't. They cost something," Thaine said with a shiver, for the May afternoon was chilly.

"Then I'll not stay here and risk my precious life for a government so darned little and stingy."

Todd sprang up with the words, but fell down again, clasping his ankle.

"Oh, yes, you will. You've enlisted already, and you have a bad ankle already. Let me see it."

Thaine examined the sprained limb carefully. He had something of his father's ability for such things combined with his mother's gentle touch.

"Let me bind it up a little while you tell me about Grass River. Then hie thee to a hospital," he said.

"There's nothing new, except that Dr. Carey has gone West for a vacation and John Jacobs is raising cain over at Wykerton because a hired hand, just a waif of an orphan boy, got drunk in Hans Wyker's joint and fell into Big Wolf and was drowned. Funny thing about it was that Darley Champers came out against Wyker for the first time. It may go hard with the old Dutchman yet. Jim Shirley isn't very well, but he never complains, you know. Jo Bennington was wild to have me enlist. I suppose some pretty University girl was backing you all the time," Todd said enthusiastically.

"The only pretty girl I care for didn't want me to go to the war at all," Thaine replied, staring gloomily out at the rain.

"Well, why do you go, then?" Todd inquired.

"Oh, she doesn't specially care for me here, either," Thaine replied. "Girls don't control this game for me. But we have some princes of men here all right."

"As for instance?" Todd queried.

"My captain, Adna Clarke, and his lieutenants, Krause and Alford. They were first to enlist in our company down in the old rink at Lawrence. Captain Clarke is the kind of a man who makes you feel like straightening right up to duty when you see him coming, and he is so genial in his discipline it is not like discipline. Lieutenant Krause fits in with him—hand and glove. But, Todd," Thaine went on enthusiastically, "if you meet a man on this campground with the face of a gentleman, the manners of a soldier, a smile like sunshine after a dull day in February, and a, well a sort of air about him that makes you feel he's your friend and that doing a kind act is the only thing a fellow should ever think of doing—that's Lieutenant Alford. There are some fine University boys here and we have all packed up our old Kansas University yell, 'Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!' to use on the Spanish. We'll make them learn to run whenever they hear that yell. The whole regiment is a credit to Kansas, if we haven't the clothes right now. You are rather a disreputable looking old mudball yourself. Let's try to get to the hospital tent."

Thaine lifted Todd Stewart to his feet, and as they started up the slushy way to the hospital tent, he said:

"Yonder is Lieutenant Alford now."

A young man with a face as genial as his manner was dignified responded pleasantly to the private's salute, and the rainfall seemed less dreary and all the camp more cheerful for this lieutenant's presence. No wonder he seemed a prince to the enthusiastic young soldier whose admiration deepened into an abiding love he was never to lose out of his life in all the years to come. In the months that followed Thaine came to know Captain Clarke and his two lieutenants, Krause and Alford, as soldier knows soldier. Nor did ever Trojan nor Roman military hero have truer homage from the common private than the boy from the Grass River Valley paid to these young men commanding his company.

The hardships of soldier life began for Thaine Aydelot and his regiment with the day of enlistment. The privations at Camp Leedy were many. The volunteers had come in meagerly clothed because they expected to be fully supplied by the government they were to serve. The camp equipments were insufficient. The food was poor, and day after day the rain poured mercilessly down on the muddy campground, where the volunteers slept on wet straw piled on the wet earth. Sore throats, colds, and pneumonia resulted, and many a homesick boy who learned to wade the rice swamps and to face the Mauser's bullets fearlessly had his first hard lesson of endurance taught to him before he left Camp Leedy on the old Topeka Fair Ground.

Wonderful history-making filled up the May days. While the fleets and land forces were moving against Cuba, the deep sea cable brought the brief story from Commodore Dewey in the harbor of Manila, "Eleven Spanish warships destroyed and no Americans killed."

And suddenly the center of interest shifted from the Cuban Island near at hand to the Philippines on the other side of the world. The front door of America that for four centuries had opened on the Atlantic ocean opened once and forever on Pacific waters. A new frontier receding ever before the footprint of the Anglo-American flung itself about the far-off island of the Orient with its old alluring call:

Something lost behind the Ranges! Over Yonder! Go you there!

And the Twentieth Kansas, under Colonel Fred Funston, broke camp and hurried to San Francisco to be ready to answer that call.

Thaine Aydelot had never been outside of Kansas before. Small wonder that the mountains, the desert, the vinelands, and orchard-lands, and rose-lands of California, the half-orientalism of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean with its world-old mystery of untamed immensity should fill each day with a newer interest; or that the conditions of soldier life at Camp Merritt beside the Golden Gate, to which the eager-hearted, untrained young student from the Kansas prairie brought all his youthful enthusiasm and patriotism and love of adventure, should wound his spirit and test his power of self-control. Small wonder, too, that the Twentieth Kansas Regiment, poorly equipped, undrilled, and non-uniformed still, should make only a sorry showing among the splendid regiments mobilized there; or that to the big, rich City of San Francisco the ragged fellows from the prairies, who were dubbed the "Kansas Scarecrows," should become the byword and laughing stock among things military.

One neglect followed another for the Kansas Twentieth. The poorest camping spot was their portion. The chill of the nights, the heat of the days oppressed them. The filth of their unsanitary grounds bred discomfort and disease.