But no military favors were shown them, and the same old stupid jests and jibes of the ignorant citizen of the other states were repeated on the Pacific seaboard. When the thirtieth of May called forth the military forces in one grand parade the Twentieth Kansas was not invited to take part.

For Thaine Aydelot, to whom Decoration Day was a sacred Sabbath always, this greatest of all indignities cut deep where a man's soul feels keenest. And when transport after transport sailed out of the San Francisco harbor, loaded with regiments for the Philippines, and still the Twentieth Kansas was left in idle waiting on the dreary sand lots of Camp Merritt and the Presidio reservation, the silent campaign that really makes a soldier was waged daily in Thaine and his comrades.

"Don't complain, boys," Captain Clarke admonished his company. "We'll be ready when we are called, and that's what really counts."

Other commanders of the regiment gave the same encouragement. So the daily drilling went on. The sons of the indomitable men and women who had conquered the border ruffian, the hostile Plains Indian, and the unfriendly prairie sod, these sons kept their faith in themselves, their pride in the old Kansas State that bore them, and their everlasting good humor and energy and ability to learn. Such men are the salt of the earth.

Todd Stewart made a brave struggle, but his slide on the muddy ground at Camp Leedy was his military undoing, and his discharge followed.

"I'm going to start back to old Grass River tomorrow," he said to Thaine Aydelot, who had called to see him with face aglow. "I've made the best fight I could, but the doctor says the infantry needs two legs, and neither one wooden. But best of all, Thaine, Jo has written that she wants me to come home. It's not so bad if there's a welcome like that waiting. She is slowly overcoming her dislike for country life. But I can't help envying you."

"Oh, you'll stand on both feet all right when you get them both on the short grass of the prairie again, and, as you say, the welcome makes up for a good many losses."

Something impenetrable came into his eyes for the moment only and then the fire of enthusiasm burned again in them, for Thaine's nerves were a-tingle with the ambition and anticipation of the young soldier waiting immediate orders, and he changed the subject eagerly.

"I came to tell you something, Todd. We are to sail the seas on the next transport to Manila, sure. And we'll see service yet, all right."

Thaine threw his cap in air and danced about the bed in his enthusiasm.

"Glory be! Won't Fred Funston do things when he hits the Orient? Best colonel that ever had the U. S. military engines to buck against."

Todd rejoiced, even in his own disappointment.

"But see here, Thaine, me child, I also have a bit of news that may interest you plumb through. My surgeon isn't equal to the Philippines either, nor the Ephesians, nor Colossians, and he's going back to some fort in the mountains. Who do you s'pose will take his place? Now, who?"

"How should I know? Seeing I've got to get this regiment off, I have to leave the hospital corps to you. Who is it?" Thaine asked.

"Dr. Horace Carey, M.D.!" Todd replied.

"You don't mean it!" Thaine gasped.

"Yes, he does, Thaine." It was Horace Carey who spoke, as he entered the hospital quarter, and, as everywhere else, the same engaging smile and magnetic charm of personality filled the place.

Thaine turned and gathered him in close embrace.

"Oh, Dr. Carey, are you really going?" He whistled, and shouted, and executed jigs in his joy. "Why do you go? Can you leave Kansas? You and me both? Oh, hurry home, Todd, and show Governor Leedy how to run things without us." And much more to like effect.

"I've a notion I'm the right man to go," Horace Carey answered. "I had experience in the late Civil War, which seems trifling to you fellows at the Presidio. I rode the Plains for some years more when rattlesnakes and Indian arrows—poisoned at that—and cholera and mountain fever called for a surgeon's aid. I have diplomas and things from the best schools in the East. I have also some good military friends in authority to back me in getting a surgeon's place in the army—and, lastly, I haven't a soul to miss me, nor home to leave dreary, if I get between you and the enemy; nobody but Boanerges Peeperville to care personally, and Mrs. Aydelot, as the only other aristocrat in the Grass River Valley, has promised to give him a home. He has always adored Virginia, Thaine, since he could remember anything."

Thaine Aydelot was only twenty-one, with little need hitherto for experience in reading human nature. Moreover, he was alert in every tingling nerve with the anticipation of an ocean voyage and of strange new sights and daring deeds half a world away. Yet something in Dr. Carey's strong face seemed to imply a deeper purpose than his words suggested. A faint sense of the nobility of the man gripped him and grew upon him, and never in the years that followed was separate from the memory of the doctor he had loved from babyhood.

* * * * *

When the Ohio woodlands were gorgeous with the frost-fired splendor of October word came to Miss Jane Aydelot, of the old Aydelot farmhouse beside the National pike road, that one Thaine Aydelot had sailed from San Francisco with the Twentieth Kansas Regiment to see service in the Philippine Islands. On board the same transport was Dr. Horace Carey, of the military medical staff. That winter Jane Aydelot's hair turned white, but the pink bloom of her cheeks and the light of her clear gray eyes made her a sweet-faced woman still, whose loveliness grew with the years.

The kiss of the same October breezes was on the Kansas prairie with the hazy horizon and the infinite beauty of wide, level landscapes, overhung by the infinite beauty of blue, tender skies. Boanerges Peeperville, established as cook in the Sunflower Inn, was at home in his cosy little quarter beside the grape arbor of the rear dooryard.

"Tell me, Bo Peep, why Dr. Carey should enter the army again and go to the Philippines?" Virginia Aydelot asked on the day the news reached the Sunflower Ranch.

Bo Peep did not answer at once. Virginia was busy arranging some big yellow chrysanthemums in a tall cut-glass vase that Dr. Carey had left to be sent down to her when Bo Peep should come to the Aydelots to make his home.

"See, Bo Peep, aren't they pretty? Set them in the middle of the table there, carefully. The first bouquet we ever had on our table was a few little sunflowers in an old peach can wrapped round with a newspaper. You didn't answer my question. Why did Horace go so far away?"

The servant took the vase carefully and placed it as commanded. Then he turned to Virginia with a face full of intense feeling.

"Miss Virgie, I done carry messages for him all my days." The pathos of the soft voice was touching. "I wasn't to give this las' one to you less'n he neveh come back. An Mis' Virgie, Doctoh Carey won't neveh come back no mo'. But I kaint tell you yet jus' why he done taken hisself to the Fillippians, not yet."

"Why do you think he will never come back? You think Thaine will come home again, don't you?" Virginia queried.

"Oh, yas'm! yas'm! Misteh Thaine, he'll come back all right. But hit's done fo'casted in my bones that Doctoh Horace won't neveh come. An' when he don't, I'll tell you why he leff'n Grass Riveh, Kansas, for the Fillippians."



CHAPTER XIX

THE "FIGHTING TWENTIETH"

Malolos and Bocaue's trenches know the Kansas yell; San Fernando and San Tomas the Kansas story swell; At Guiguinto's fiercest battle yon flag in honor flew; What roaring rifles kept it, all Luna's army knew; And high it swung o'er Caloocan, Bagbag and Marilao— "Those raggedy Pops from Kansas" 'fore God they're heroes now. —Lieutenant-Colonel E. C. Little.

Night had fallen on the city of Manila. Before it lay the bay whose waters lapped softly against pier and shipping. Behind it in the great arc of a circle stretched the American line of military outposts, guarded by sentinels. Beyond that line, north, east, and south, there radiated a tangle of roads and trails through little villages of nipa huts, past rice fields and jungles, marshes and rivers, into the very heart of Luzon. Manila was under American military government, but Luzon was in insurrection against all government, and a network of rebellious lines of enemies fretted every jungle, hid in every village, intrenched itself in every rice field, and banked its earthworks beyond every river. While Emilio Aguinaldo, the shrewd leader of an ignorant, half-savage peasantry, plotted craftily with his associates for the seizure of the rich capital of Luzon and dreamed of the autocratic power and heaps of looted treasure that he should soon control. For weeks in sight of the American outposts, the Filipinos had strengthened their trenches, and established their fortifications, the while they bided the hour of outbreak and slaughter of the despised Americanos, and the seizing of the rich booty afterward.

Upon the Tondo road, running north from Manila to Caloocan, Thaine Aydelot, with a Kansas University comrade, was doing silent sentinel duty. The outpost was nearly a mile away from a bridge on the outskirts of Manila. In the attack imminent, this bridge would be one of the keys to the city, and the command had been given to hold it against all invaders at any cost.

Between Thaine and the bridge was a stretch of dusty road, flanked on one side by nipa huts. On the other side were scattered dwellings, tall shrubbery, and low-lying rice fields, beyond which lay the jungle.

Before the young sentinel the road made a sharp bend, cutting off the view and giving no hint to the enemy around this bend of how strong a force might be filling the road toward the bridge.

Thaine knew that around that bend and behind the rice dykes and in the nearby trenches were Filipino insurgents with finger on the trigger ready to begin an assault. But until the first gun of the first battle is fired, battle seems impossible to the young soldier.

As Thaine turned from the dim road, he caught the glint of starlight on the edge of a rice swamp. He wanted to fight Filipinos tonight, not memories. But the memory of the Aydelot grove and the water lilies opening their creamy hearts to the moonlight, and Leigh Shirley in her white dress with her cheeks faintly pink in the clear shadows, all swept his mind and challenged him to forget everything else.

The same grip on a principle, coupled with a daring spirit and love of adventure that had brought old Jean Aydelot to the Virginia colony long ago, and had pushed Francis Aydelot across the Alleghanies into the forests of the Ohio frontier, and had called Asher Aydelot to the unconquered prairies of the big West—the same love of adventure and daring spirit and belief in a cause bigger than his own interests had lured Thaine Aydelot on to the islands of Oriental seas. With the military schooling and unschooling where discipline tends to make a soldier, and absence of home influence tends to make the careless rowdy, the sterling uprightness of the Aydelots and the inborn gentility of the Thaines kept the boy from the Kansas prairies a fearless gentleman. Withal, he was exuberantly pleased with life, as a young man of twenty-one should be. He lived mostly in the company of Kansas University men, and with the old University yell of "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" for their slogan, they stood shoulder to shoulder in every conflict.

Lastly, he was a hero-worshiper at the shrine of his colonel, Fred Funston, and his captain, Adna Clarke; while in all the regiment, the fair face of young Lieutenant Alford seemed to him most gracious. Alford was his soldier ideal, type of the best the battlefield may know. And, even if all this admiration did have in it much of youthful sentimentalism, it took nothing from his efficiency when he came to his place on the firing line.

"I wonder where Doctor Carey is tonight," Thaine's comrade said in a low voice, as the two came together in the road.

"What's made you think of him?" Thaine asked.

"I haven't seen him since Christmas day. A young Filipino and I got into a scrap with a drunken Chinaman who was beating a boy, and the Chink slashed us both. Carey stitched us up, but the other fellow keeps a scar across his face, all right."

"I know that Filipino," Thaine said. "He seems like a fine young man. The scar was a marker for him. I'd know him by it anywhere."

"So should I, and by his peculiar gait. I saw a man slipping along beyond the lines just now who made me think of that fellow, and that made me think of Doctor Carey," the sentinel said, and turned away.

It was after nine o'clock, and the hours were already beginning to stretch wearily for sentinels, when a faint sound of guns away to the eastward broke on the air. Again and again it came, intermittently at first, but increasing to a steady roar. Down in Manila there was dead quiet, but along the American line of outposts the ripping of Mauser bullets and long streaks of light flashed the Filipino challenge to war in steady volleys.

As Thaine listened, the firing seemed to be creeping gradually toward the north, and he knew the insurgents were swinging toward the Tondo road, down which they would rush to storm the bridge. In that moment civil life dropped off like a garment, and he stood up a soldier. He crept cautiously toward the bend to see what lay beyond, and dropped on his face in the dusty way as a whirl of bullets split the air above his head.

As he sprang back to his place beside his comrade, other sentinels joined them, and behind them loomed the tall form of Captain Clarke.

"What's around there, Aydelot?" Clarke asked.

"Didn't you hear?"

Thaine's reply was lost in a roar of rifles, followed by increased firing along the entire line, massing to the north before the Twentieth's front.

"There are ten more men on the way up here. We'll hold this place until reinforcements come," Captain Clarke declared.

It was such a strategic point as sometimes turns the history of war. But the odds are heavy for sixteen men to stand against swarms of insurgents armed with Mausers and Remingtons. In the thrill of that moment, Thaine Aydelot would have died by inches had this tall, cool-headed captain of his demanded it. Clarke arranged his men on either side of the way, and the return fire began. Suddenly up the road a lantern gleamed. An instant later a cannon shot plowed the dust between the two lines of men.

"They've turned a cannon loose. Watch out," Clarke called through the darkness.

A second time and a third the lantern glowed, and each time a cannon ball crashed through a nipa hut beside the little company, or threw a shower of dust about the place.

"They have to load that gun by the light of a lantern. Let's fix the lantern," Thaine cried, as the dust cloud settled down.

"Good! Watch your aim, boys," Captain Clarke replied.

The bullets were falling thick about them. They whizzed through the bushes, they cut into the thatched huts, they flung swirls of dust on the little line of brave soldiers, they poured like stinging sweeps of hail, volley after volley, along the Tondo road. When the lantern flashed again, sixteen bullets riddled it, and without its help the big gun was useless.

"Poor lantern! It fell on the firing line, brave to the last," Thaine declared as the smoke lifted.

But the loss of the cannon only doubled the insurgents' efforts, and they threshed at the invincible little band with smoking lead. On the one side was a host of Filipino rebels, believing by the incessant firing of the Kansans that it was facing an equal host. On the other side were sixteen men who, knowing the odds against them, dared the game of war to the limit.

"How many rounds have you left?" Captain Clarke asked.

"Only one," came the answer.

"Give it to them when I give the word. We won't run till our guns are empty," the captain declared grimly.

The last shot was ready to fly, when a wild yell burst from the darkness behind them, the shouts to "remember the Maine," mingled with the old university yell of "Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U. oo!" and reinforcements charged to the relief of the invincible sixteen.

What disaster might have followed the capture of the Tondo road and the attack upon the bridge is only conjecture. What did happen is history—type henceforth of that line of history every company of the Twentieth Kansas was to help to build. When daylight came, Thaine Aydelot saw the frontier line that he had proudly felt himself called hither to push back, and the reality of it was awful. He had pictured captured trenches, but he had not put in their decoration—the prone forms of dead Filipinos with staring eyes, seeing nothing earthly any more forever.

Beyond that line, however, lay the new wilderness that the Anglo-American must conquer, and he flung himself upon the firing line, as if the safety and honor of the American nation rested on his shoulders alone; while all his dreams of glorious warfare, where Greek meets Greek in splendid gallantry, faded out before the actual warfare of the days and nights that followed.

Thaine's regiment, not the "Kansas Scarecrows," but the "Fighting Twentieth" now, was one of the regiments on which rested the brunt of driving back and subduing the rebellious Filipinos. Swiftly the Kansas boys pushed into the unknown country north of Manila. They rushed across the rice fields, whose low dykes gave little protection from the enemy. They plunged through marshes, waist deep in water. They lay for hours behind their earthworks, half buried in muddy slime. They slept in holes, drenched to the skin. With the University yell for their battle cry of freedom, they tore through tropical jungles with the bullets of the enemy cutting the branches overhead or spattering the dirt about their feet.

The American regiments were six days in reaching Caloocan, a prosperous town only six miles north of Manila; a mile a day, every foot stubbornly contested.

On Sabbath morning in the first day's struggle, Thaine was running in a line of soldiery toward the Filipino fortification, when he was halted beside a thatched hut that stood between the guns of both armies and was riddled with bullets.

"Help the corporal here, Aydelot, then double quick it ahead," Lieutenant Krause commanded.

Thaine followed the corporal inside the hut where, shot to pieces, lay the mangled forms of women and children who had caught the storm of bullets from both firing lines. Through a gaping hole in the wall beyond, he saw a shallow pit where wounded and dead men and women were huddled together.

"Help me get out the live ones and send them back to Manila, and we'll cover the others right here," the corporal declared.

It was the neighborhood custom of the Grass River Valley for young men to assist at every funeral. Thaine had jokingly dubbed himself "official neighborhood pall-bearer," and had served at so many funerals that the service had become merely one of silent dignity which he forgot the next hour. He knew just how to place the flowers effectively, when to step aside and wait, and when to come forward and take hold. And these were the only kinds of services he had known for the dead.

As he bent over the blood-smeared bodies to take up the wounded and dying now, the horror of war burst upon him, and no dead face could be more ashy gray than the young soldier's face as he lifted it above a dying Filipino woman whom he stretched tenderly beside the hut. The next victim was a boy, a deserter from Manila, whom Thaine recognized by a scar across his cheek as the young Filipino whose wound Doctor Carey had dressed.

"You poor fellow!" Thaine said softly.

The boy's eyes opened in recognition.

"For liberty," he murmured in Spanish, with a scowling face. Then the scowl faded to a smile, and in a moment more he had entered eternal liberty.

A detachment of the Red Cross with a white-haired surgeon just then relieved the corporal of the wounded, and Thaine saw Dr. Horace Carey coming toward him.

"I know what you are thinking. Maybe your gun did a good deal of it. This is war, Thaine."

The young man's dark eyes burned with agony at the thought.

"Forget it," Carey added hurriedly. "It is the lost cause here. I worked that line myself for four years long ago. I know the feeling. But this is the only medicine to give the islands here. They can't manage liberty for themselves. You are giving them more freedom with your rifle today than they could get for themselves in a century. Don't wet your powder with your tears. You may need it for the devil that's after you now. Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and count the cost again. Good-by."

The doctor hastened away with the wounded, and Thaine helped to straighten out the forms about him and to fill the pit where they were placed in one common grave.

"Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and then count the cost."

Somehow, the words, ringing again and again down his mind, could not take away the picture of the thing he had just witnessed. And the dying gasp, "For liberty!" seemed to stab his soul, as he ran forward.

Two days later his company had orders to hold the trenches before a jungle filled with sharpshooters. All day the sun had blazed down upon them and the humid atmosphere had scalded them. All day the murderous "ping! ping!" of the hidden Mauser in the jungle had stung the air about them.

Late in the afternoon Thaine lay crouched behind his low defense with a college comrade on either side. Colonel Funston had just given the command to rid the woods of the sharpshooters, and the force ordered to the attack came racing by. Captain Clarke stood near Thaine's post, and as the soldiers rushed forward, Lieutenant Alford halted beside him. Even in the thrill of the hour, the private down in the trenches felt a sense of bigger manhood as he looked at the young officer, for Alford was every inch a king; his soldier uniform became him like a robe of royalty. His fine face was aglow now with the enthusiasm of the battle and the assurance of victory.

Thaine did not hear the words of the two officers, for the jungle was beginning to roar with battle cries and bursting fire from many guns. But he knew the two had been boyhood friends, university chums, and military comrades, and the love of man for man shone in their faces.

Alford tarried but a moment with Clarke. As he spied Thaine and his comrades, he gave an instant's glance of kindly recognition to the admiring young privates, and was gone. The three involuntarily rose to their feet, as if to follow him, and from three lusty throats they sent after him the beloved battle yell of the regiment, "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K. U.!" then dropped to their places again and hugged the earth as the rifle balls whizzed about them.

"I'm glad I'm alive and I'm glad I know that man," Thaine said to his neighbors.

"Alford's a prince. I'll bet he'll clean that woods before he's through. His work is always well done. Would you listen to that?" his comrade replied.

A tremendous crash of rifle shots seemed to split the jungle as the Kansas troops charged into it. The men in the trenches lay flat to the earth while the balls fell about them or sang a long whining note through the air over them. Fiercer grew the fray, and louder roared the guns, and wilder the bullets flew, as the fighting lines swept over the enemy's earthworks and struck with deadly force into the heart of its wooded cover.

Then came a lull for shifting the fighting grip. A relief force was hurried to the front and the first companies retired for a brief rest. They fell back in order, while the aids came trooping out of the brush in groups, bearing the wounded to places of shelter. Thaine Aydelot and his comrades lifted their heads above the earthworks for an instant. Captain Clarke sat near on a little knoll staring hard at a stretcher borne toward him by the aids. The manner of covering indicated a dead body on it.

"How different the captain's face is from what it was before the attack," Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant's face, so full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his mind.

"Who is it, boys?" Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher.

"Lieutenant Alford," they answered.

Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot's eyes and Doctor Carey's words stung like powder burns in his memory.

"Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in, and count the cost again."

In civil life character builds slowly up to higher levels. In war, it leaps upward in an instant. Thaine sprang to his feet and stood up to his full height in the blaze of the tropical sunshine. He did not see his captain, who had dropped to the ground like a wounded thing, stabbed to the soul with an agony of sorrow. He did not see the still form of the young lieutenant outlined under the cover of the stretcher. He did not see the trenches nor the lines of khaki-clad, sun-browned soldiery plunging forward to rid the jungle of its deadly peril. In that one moment he looked down the years with clear vision, as his father, Asher Aydelot, had learned to look before him, and he saw manhood and a new worth in human deeds. He had been a sentimental dreamer, ambitious for honors fairly earned, and eager for adventure. The first shots in the night attack on the Tondo road made him a soldier. The martyrdom of Lieutenant Alford made him a patriot. Humanity must be worth much, it seemed to him, if, in the providence of God, such blood must be spilled to redeem it to nobler civilization.

Six weeks after the death of Alford before Caloocan, Dr. Horace Carey came up from the hospital in Manila to the American line to see Thaine Aydelot. The Kansas boys had been on duty in the trenches north of Caloocan for forty days, living beside the breastworks under the rude shelter of bamboo poles, watching a sleepless enemy—a life as full of wearing monotony and hardship as it was full of constant peril.

"Well, Thaine, how goes the game?" Carey asked, as he sat beside the young soldier from the Grass River Valley. "I helped you into this world. I'm glad I haven't had to help you out yet."

Carey had never before seen any resemblance to Asher Aydelot in his son's face. It was purely a type of the old Thaine family of Virginia. But today, the pose of the head, the expression of the mouth, the far-seeing gaze of the dark eyes, bespoke the heritage of the house of Aydelot.

"I hope not to have any more help from you, either. You got me into the scrape; I'll see to the rest," Thaine replied. "Don't I look all right? I haven't had a bath, except in swamp mud, since the first of February. Today is the twenty-third of March. Neither have I seen a razor. Notice my silky beard. Nor a dress suit, nor a—anything else civilized. Six weeks in one hole, killing Filipinos for our amusement and dodging their old Remingtons for theirs, living on army rations and respect for the flag of my country, may not improve my appearance, but it hasn't started me to the sick-shack yet. Any news from home?" Thaine ended with the question put so carelessly, with a face so impenetrable that Doctor Carey took notice at once.

"Homesick!" was his mental diagnosis, but he answered with equal carelessness.

"Yes, I had a letter from Leigh Shirley."

Thaine's eyes were too full of unspeakable things now for him to hold out.

"She says the alfalfa is doing well. She and Jim have kept up all the interest, and are beginning to reduce the principal. That's why she wrote."

"Brave little soldier," Thaine muttered.

"Yes, civil life has its heroes, too," the doctor responded. "She also says," he continued, "that John Jacobs has had Hans Wyker convicted of running a joint and Hans had to pay a fine and stick in the Careyville jail thirty days. Hans won't love John for that when he gets out."

"What a hater of whisky John Jacobs is. He's always on the firing line and never misses his aim, bless him!" Thaine declared.

"Yes, Jacobs' battle is a steady one. He told me just before I left Kansas how his mother was killed in a saloon in Cincinnati when she was trying to get his father out of it. John wouldn't live in a state that had no prohibitory law," the doctor commented.

"Did Leigh write anything else?" Thaine asked.

"Yes. Jo Bennington and Todd Stewart are married. Pryor Gaines is in Pekin, and he writes that there are rumblings of trouble over there. Shall we go over and settle it when we finish the Filipino fuss?"

"Might as well. I'd like to see old Pryor. I'm glad Todd and Jo had sense enough to take each other. I suppose Jo overcame her notions of living only in the city. What else?" Thaine replied.

"Nothing else. That's your message." Carey's black eyes held a shrewd twinkle.

"Why mine?" The impenetrable face was on Thaine again.

"See here, boy, don't think I haven't read her story, page by page. If Leigh had sent you a single line, I'd have begun to doubt."

Thaine threw one arm about the doctor's shoulder and said not a word. Then Carey read his story also.

"I nearly forgot to tell you that Leigh is doing well with her drawings. She sent me this, for which she had a good price paid her."

Doctor Carey unfolded the paper back of a magazine having a bit of prairie landscape for a cover design. In the distance, three headlands swam in the golden haze of a Kansas October sunset, and their long purple shadows fell wide across the brown prairie and fields of garnered harvests.

Thaine studied it carefully, but offered no comment.

"Doctor Carey, what brought you to the Philippines?" he asked suddenly.

"To look after you," Carey replied frankly.

"Me! Do I need it?"

"You may. In that case I'll be first aid to the injured," Carey answered. "I'm to go with the 'Fighting Twentieth' when it starts out of these hog wallows toward the insurgents' capital. I must get back to Manila and pack for it. I have my orders to be ready in twenty-four hours."

In twenty-four hours the "Fighting Twentieth" left its six-weeks' habitation in the trenches and began its campaign northward, and the young-hearted, white-haired physician with magnetic smile and skillful judgment found a work in army service so broad and useful that he loved it for its opportunity.

Fortunately, Thaine had no need for "first aid" from Doctor Carey, and he saw the doctor only rarely in the sixty days that followed. When the two had time for each other again, Colonel Fred Funston's name had been written round the world in the annals of military achievement, the resourceful, courageous, beloved leader of a band of fighters from the Kansas prairies who were never defeated, never driven back, never daunted by circumstances. Great were the pen of that historian that could fittingly set forth all the deeds of daring and acts of humanity of every company under every brave captain, for they "all made history, and left records of unfading glory."

The regiment had reached the Rio Grande, leaving no unconquered post behind it. Under fire, it had forded the Tulijan, shoulder-deep to the shorter men. Under fire, it had forged a way through Guiguinto and Malolos. Under fire, it had swam the Marilao and the Bagbag. And now, beyond Calumpit, the flower of Aguinaldo's army was massed under General Luna, north of the Rio Grande. A network of strong fortifications lay between it and the river, and it commanded all the wide water-front.

As the soldiers waited orders on the south side of the river, Doctor Horace Carey left his work and sought out Thaine's company, impelled by the same instinct that once turned him from the old Sunflower Trail to find Virginia Aydelot lost on the solitary snow-covered prairie beyond Little Wolf Creek.

"What's before you now?" the doctor asked, as he and Thaine sat on the ground together.

"The Rio Grande now. We must be nearly to the end if we rout General Luna here," Thaine replied.

"You've stood it well. I guess you don't need me after all," Carey remarked.

"I always need you, Doctor Carey," Thaine said earnestly. "Never more than now. When I saw Captain Clarke wounded and carried away on the other side of the Tulijan, and could only say 'Captain, my captain,' I needed you. When Captain Elliot was killed, I needed you; and when Captain William Watson was shot and wouldn't stay dead because we need him so, and when Metcalf, Bishop, Agnew, Glasgow, Ramsey, and Martin, and all the other big-brained fellows do big things, I need you again. Life is a great game; I'm glad I'm in it."

Horace Carey had never before seen Thaine's bright face so alert with manly power and beauty and thoughtfulness. War had hardened him. Danger had tried him. Human needs, larger than battle lines alone can know, had strengthened him. Vision of large purposes had uplifted him. As he stood before the white-haired physician whom he had loved from earliest memory, Carey murmured to himself:

"Can the world find grander soldiers to fight its battles than these sun-browned boys from our old Kansas prairies?"

"We are going across to Luna's stronghold in a few minutes. Watch him go into eclipse before Fred Funston. If you stand right here, you'll see me helping at the job. Good-by," Thaine declared, and, at the bugle call, fell into his place.

Beyond the river a steady fire was opened on the American forces, and no bridge nor boat was there by which to cross. Doctor Carey stood watching the situation with a strange sense of unrest in his mind.

"There must be rafts," declared Colonel Funston.

And there were rafts, hastily made of bamboo poles.

"Somebody must swim across and fasten a cable over there by which to tow the rafts across. Who will volunteer? You see what's before you," Funston asserted.

Horace Carey saw two soldiers, Corporal Trembly and Private Edward White, seize the cable, plunge into the river, and strike out directly toward the farther side filled with Filipino forces. Rifle balls split the water about them. Bullet after bullet cut the air above them. Shot after shot from the ambushed enemy hurtled toward them. The two young men surged steadily ahead, bent only on reaching the bank and fastening the cable. They knew only one word, duty, and they did the thing they had agreed to do. Once across the river, they ran nimbly up the bank and made fast the rope's end, while cheer after cheer rose from their comrades watching them, and the battle cry of the Fighting Twentieth, "Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U.," went pulsing out across the waters of the Rio Grande as full and strong as in the days when it rolled out on the university campus on far-away Mount Oread, beside the Kaw.

The rafts sped along the cable, and squad after squad went pell mell into General Luna's stronghold, under stubborn fire from the frantic rebels.

Thaine Aydelot was on the last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water's edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, but not injured, by the smoke of a gun. He saw the two start forward. Then the faint "ping" of a Mauser came to his ears, and Thaine threw up his hands and fell backward into the water and sank from sight, while the other soldiers, unknowing, rushed forward into battle.

For a moment, Horace Carey stood like a statue, then he sprang into the river and swam against the fire of the hidden foe to where Thaine Aydelot had disappeared. Ten minutes later, while Luna's forces were trying vainly to resist the daring Americans, Thaine Aydelot lay on a raft which Carey, with a Red Cross aid, was pulling toward the south bank.

* * * * *

When the Fighting Twentieth soldiers were relieved from service, and turned their faces gladly toward the Kansas prairies, whither hundreds of proud fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts were waiting to give eager, happy welcome, Thaine Aydelot lay hovering between life and death in the hospital at Manila. The white-haired doctor who had saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande watched hourly beside him, relying not so much on the ministrations of his calling as in his trust in an Infinite Father, through whom at last the sick may be made whole.



CHAPTER XX

THE CROOKED TRAIL

Life may be given in many ways, And loyalty to truth be sealed As bravely in the closet as the field. —Lowell.

"Here's yo' letter from the Fillippians, Mis' Virginia; Mr. Champers done bring hit for you all." Boanerges Peeperville fairly danced into the living room of the Sunflower Inn. "They ain't no black mournin' aidge bindin' it round nuthah, thank the good Lawd foh that."

Virginia Aydelot opened the letter with trembling fingers. It was only a brief page, but the message on it was big with comfort for her.

"It is from Horace," she said, as her eyes followed the lines. "He was with Thaine when he wrote it. Thaine is perfectly well again and busy as ever. He and Horace seem to be needed over there yet awhile. Isn't it wonderful how Thaine ever lived through that dreadful bullet wound and fever?"

"I jus' wondeh how you all stand up undeh such 'flictions. Seems to me a motheh done wilt down, but they don't. Mothehs is the bravest things they is," Bo Peep declared with a broad grin of admiration.

"Oh, we get schooled to it. Asher's mother waited through six years while he was in army service; and remember how long I waited in Virginia for him to come back to me! I wondered at the test of my endurance then. I know now it was to prepare me for Thaine's time of service for his country."

"I done remember, all right, 'bout that time in ol' Virginia, an' the day I taken you the letteh up in the little glen behind the ol' mansion house whah hit wah so cool and the watah's so cleah. Misteh Horace wah home that day, too. Say, Mis' Virginia, did—did he done mention my name anywhar in that letteh?"

The pathos of the dark face was pitiful.

"'My best love to Bo Peep.'" Virginia pointed to the line as she read.

"Kin I please have this huh envelope?" Bo Peep pleaded, and, clutching it as a sacred treasure, he said: "Mis' Virginia, didn't I done tellen you Misteh Thaine would come back?"

"How did you know?" Virginia asked with shining eyes.

"Becuz of what Doctoh Horace lef for me to tell you. It cain't do no hahm to tell hit thus fah."

Bo Peep hesitated, and Virginia looked curiously at him.

"Doctor Horace won't never come back. I tol' you that sufficiency times. When he lef, he say, 'Tel Mis' Virginia, if I don't come back, I'se done goin' to be with Misteh Thaine an' take care of him, 'cause I love the boy,—hit cain't do no hahm to tell you that while Misteh Horace still writen to us. An' didn't he tak' care of Misteh Thaine? Didn't he lef his place an' go down to that Rigrand Riveh, an' didn't he see Misteh Thaine fall back with a bullet pushin' him right into the watah? Yes, an' be drownded if Doctoh Horace hadn't done swum right then and fish him out. An' didn't he stay night time an' day time right by the blessed boy, till he's pullin' him out of dangeh of death's wing? Oh, yo' son done comin' back 'cause Misteh Horace say he sho' goin' jus' tak' care of him."

"But, Bo Peep, why do you not believe we'll have Horace here again?" Virginia asked.

The black man only shook his head mournfully as he answered determinedly, "Ef yo' saves a life, you has to give one for hit, mos' eveh time, an' mo' specially in the Fillippians whah they's so murderful and slaughterous."

"Oh, you ought not think that way," Virginia urged. "Run quick, now, and take the news to Asher. I don't know where he is this morning."

"He's talkin' to Mr. Dabley Champehs out to the barn," Bo Peep said as he hurried away.

Asher Aydelot was standing before the big barn doors when Darley Champers turned from the main road and drove into the barnyard. It was a delicious April morning, with all the level prairie lands smiling back at the skies above them, and every breath of the morning breeze bearing new vigor and inspiration in its caressing touch.

"Good morning, Champers; fine morning to live," Asher called out cheerily.

"Mornin', Aydelot; fine day, fine! Miss Shirley told me last fall she got her first inspiration for buyin' a quarter of land with nothin' and faith, and makin' it pay for itself, out of one of Coburn's Agricultural Reports. I reckon if a book like that could inspire a woman, they's plenty in a mornin' like this to inspire old Satan to a more uprighteous line of goods than he generally carries. I never see the country look better. Your wheat is tremendous. How's the country look to you?" Champers responded.

"I can remember when it looked a good deal worse," Asher replied. "The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy boom lots into harvest fields."

The two men had seated themselves on the sloping driveway before the barn doors. Asher was chewing the tender joint of a spear of foxtail grass, and Champers had lighted a heavy cigar.

"You don't smoke, I believe," he said cordially, "or I'd insist on offering the mate."

"No, I just chew," Asher replied, as he bent the foxtail thoughtfully in his fingers and looked out toward the wheat fields already rippling like waves under the morning breeze.

"Say, Aydelot, do you remember the day I come down this valley and tried my danged best to get you to sell out for a song? I've done some pretty scaly things, all inside the letter of the law, since then, but never anything that's stuck in my craw like that. I guess you ain't forgot it, neither?"

"I remember more of those first years than of these later ones, and I haven't forgotten when you came to the Grass River schoolhouse one hot Sunday about grasshopper time, but I don't believe anybody holds it against you. You were out for business just as we were," Asher replied with a genial smile.

"Say! D'recollect what you said to me when I invited you to cast your glims over this very country, a burnt-up old prairie that day, so scorched it was too dry and hot to cut up into town lots for an addition to Hades?"

Asher laughed now.

"No, I don't remember anything about that. It was just the general line of events that stayed with me," he said.

"Well, I do; and I'll never forget the look in your eyes when you said it, neither. I'd told you, as I say, just to look at this God-forsaken old plain and tell me what you see. And you looked, like you was glimpsin' heaven a'most, and just said sorter solemn like an' prophetic: 'I see a land fair as the Garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers—a land of comfortable homes and schoolhouses and churches, and no saloons nor breweries.' And then I broke in and told you I see a danged fool, and you says, 'Come down here in twenty-five year and make a hunt for me then.' And, by golly, Aydelot, here I am. You've everlastingly conquered the prairies for sure, and you are a young man, not fifty-five yet."

"Well, you can see most of those things that I saw that day out yonder, can't you?"

Asher's eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds' songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.

"Yes, I'm still among the middle-aged," he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. "But I don't know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There's still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. I'll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I'll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life?"

At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey's letter, and the subject shifted to the problems of the far East.

"We aren't the only people who are having trouble," Asher said. "I read in the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance."

"What's them Boxers wantin'? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?" Darley Champers asked.

"Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look like a football game. I hope Pryor will not be in their line of march."

"Pryor Gaines'd better stayed right here. It's what's likely to happen to a man who goes missionarying too far, and we could 'a used him here."

It was an unusual concession for Darley Champers to make regarding the church, and Asher looked keenly at him.

"Say, Aydelot," Champers said suddenly, "you have more influence with John Jacobs 'n anybody else, I know. If you see the Jew, pass it on to him that Wyker's at his old cut-ups again over in Wykerton, and he's danged bitter against Jacobs. I can help him on the side like I did before, but the Jew's got hold of enough over there now to run things, with ownin' land all round and holdin' mortgages on town property just to keep joints out of 'em. I do no end of business for Jacobs now. Never had dealin's with a straighter man. But he'd better look out for Wyker. The Dutchman's insides is all green with poison, he's hated Jacobs so many years."

"I guess John will make it hard on him if they come to blows again. The jail sentence and fine Jacobs fastened on him let Wyker down easy. John Jacobs is one of the state's big men," Asher responded.

"We lost another big man when we let Doc Carey go," Champers went on. "I used to set up nights and rest myself hatin' him. He done the biggest missionary work in me the two weeks I stayed at his house ever was done for a benighted heathen. I hated to see him go." The sadness of the tone was genuine. "But I mustn't be hangin' round here all the mornin'; I've got other things to do. Hope your boy'll keep a-goin' till his term's out. Goodday!" And Champers was gone.

"Till his term's out!" Asher repeated with a smile. "Wouldn't that six-footer of a soldier boy, whose patriotism burns like a furnace, see the joke to that! Till he gets his stripes off and forgets the lock-step! My Thaine, who is giving a young man's strength of body and inspiration of soul to his country's service! But Carey did do a missionary work in Champers. The fellow was crooked enough 'inside the law always,' as he said, but no more out of line than scores of reputable business men are today. And the fact that he's Jacobs' agent now measures the degree of trustworthiness Carey has helped to waken in him."

Darley Champers' business took him down the river to the Cloverdale Ranch, where he found Leigh Shirley training the young vines up the trellis by the west porch.

"You got a mighty pretty place here; just looks like Jim Shirley," Champers declared as he greeted the young gardener.

"Yes, Uncle Jim is never so happy as when he is puttering about the lawn and garden," Leigh answered.

"How's your alfalfa doin'?" Champers asked as he turned toward the level stretch of rich green alfalfa fields. "Danged money-maker for you," he added jovially.

"We'll clear the place with the first cutting this year. It's just the thing for Uncle Jim," Leigh asserted.

"Yep, Jim's in clover—alfalfa, ruther. You had a good business head when you run your bluff some years ago, an' you wan't only nineteen then. You walked into my place an' jest bought that land on sheer bluff." Champers laughed uproariously, but he grew sober in the next minute.

"Miss Shirley," he said gravely, "I ain't got much style nor sentiment in my makin's, but I've honestly tried to be humane by widders an' orphans. I've done men to keep 'em from doin' me, or jest 'cause they was danged easy, but I never wronged no woman, not even my wife, who divorced me years ago back East 'cause I wouldn't turn my old mother out o' doors, but kep' her and provided for her long as she lived."

Nobody in Kansas had ever heard Darley Champers mention his home relations before. Leigh looked at him gravely, and the sympathy in her deep blue eyes was grateful to the uncultured man before her.

"Miss Shirley, I ain't wantin' to meddle none, but I come down here to ask you if you know anything about your father?"

Leigh gave a start and stared at her questioner, but her woman's instinct told her that only kindly purpose lay back of his question.

He had sat down on the edge of the porch and Leigh stood leaning against the trellis, clutching the narrow slats, as she looked at him.

"I think he is dead," she answered slowly. "Uncle Jim says he must be. He was a bad man, made bad not by blood but by selfishness. The Shirleys are a fine family."

"Excuse me for sayin' it, Miss, but you took every good trait of that family, an' Nature jest shied every bad trait as far from you as it took the sins of our old savage Anglo-Saxon ancestors off of our heads; them that used to kill an' eat their neighborin' tribes, like the Filipinos, they was. Don't never forget that you're a Shirley an' not a Tank. Your grandma's name was Tank, I've been told."

Leigh made no response, but something in her face and in the poise of her figure bespoke the truth of Darley Champers' words.

"I jest come down to tell you," he continued, "that the man I represented when I sold you this quarter, he represented your father, Tank Shirley, and Tank got it through this man away from Jim out of pure hate. I sold it back to you out of pure spite to Tank's agent, who was naggin' me. If your father is dead, there'd ought to be somethin' comin' back, as the money you paid for the land would help you some if we could get it back. I come as a friend. I'm kinder in Doc Carey's shoes while he's gone, you see. You've got the land as good as paid for. It will be clear, you say, by June. Buyin' it of your own father, if there's any estate left of him, you'd ought to have it. Money's always a handy commodity, an' I'd like to see you git what's your'n after your plucky bluff and winnin'. You could use it, I reckon?"

"We need it very much," Leigh assured him.

"Say, would you mind tellin' me if you find out anything about your father's whereabouts or anything?" Champers queried.

"Yes, I will," Leigh replied, "but will you tell me what you know about him; you must know something?"

It was Champers' turn to start now. "N-not much; not as much as I'm goin' to know, and it's not for my profit, neither. I don't make money out of women's needs. I never made a cent on this sale to you, but it was worth it to get to do that agent once," Champers declared.

Leigh waited quietly.

"I'll be in better shape inside of two days to tell you something definite. I wish Carey was here. Do you know where he got the money he loaned you?"

"I never asked him," Leigh answered.

"He borrowed it of Miss Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio."

Champers did not mean to be brutal, but the sharp cry of pain and the look of anguish on Leigh Shirley's face told how grievous was the wound his words had made.

"Why, you paid it all back; she ain't lost nothin'. Besides, I heard with my own ears folks sayin' she'd always loved you and it was a pity Jim ever took you away from her. She might 'a done well by you, they said. You got no wrong due. Lord knows you've paid it conscientiously enough," Darley Champers insisted.

"Mr. Champers, will you be sure to tell me all you know as soon as possible? Meantime, I'll try to find out something to tell you."

"I sure will. Goodday to you."

When Champers rose to leave, Leigh put out her hand to him, and the winning smile that made all Grass River folk love her as they loved her uncle Jim now touched the best spot in the heart of the man before her.

"God knows it's a lot better to do for folks than to do 'em, and in the end I believe you prosper more at it. My business, except the infernal boom days, never was so good as it's been since I had that time with Carey, and it's all clean business, too, not a smirch on it. Wish I could forget a few things I've did, though." So Darley Champers thought, as he drove up the old Grass River trail in the glory of the April morning.

That morning, Leigh Shirley wrote a long letter to Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio. Leigh had written many letters to her before, but never one with a plea like this. Miss Jane had mentally grown up with Leigh and had built many a romance about her, which was only hinted at in the letters she received.

In the letter of this morning, Leigh begged for all the information Miss Jane could give concerning her father, and further, she pleaded boldly for the reconciliation of the Aydelot family, a thing she had never written of before. Five days later her letter came back "unclaimed" with a brief statement from the Cloverdale postmaster that Miss Jane Aydelot had passed away on the day the letter was written, much beloved, etc.

John Jacobs had no need to be warned by Asher Aydelot of Hans Wyker's doings. He knew all of Wyker's movements through Rosie Gimpke. Jacobs had been kind to Rosie, whose bare, loveless life knew few kindnesses, and she harbored the memory of a good deed as her grandfather harbored his hatred. Moreover, the Wyker joint had played havoc with the Gimpke family. Her father had died from a fall received in a drunken brawl there. Two brothers, too drunk to know better, had driven into Little Wolf in a spring flood and been drowned. A sister had married a drinking man who regularly beat her in his regular sprees. For a heavy-footed, heavy-brained, fat German girl, Rosie Gimpke could get into action with surprising alacrity for the safety of one who had shown her a kindness.

And it was Rosie Gimpke, whom John Jacobs called the Wykerton W. C. T. U., who swiftly put the word to him that her grandfather was again defying the law and menacing the public welfare.

Unfortunately, the messenger who served Rosie in this emergency was overtaken by Hans and forced to divulge his mission, threatened with dire evils if he said a word to Rosie about Hans having halted him, and urged to go with all haste on his errand, and to be sure of the reward, a ticket to the coming circus and two dishes of ice cream from the Wyker eating house, as per Rosie's promise.

The boy hastened from the grinning Hans and did his errand, and afterward held his peace, so far as Rosie was concerned. But he stupidly unloaded his message and Hans' interference and threats to John Jacobs as an outsider whom the Wyker family rows could not touch, and had another dish of ice cream at Jacobs' expense.

This messenger was able, for he brought the word to Rosie that John Jacobs would come to his Little Wolf ranch the next day, and late in the evening drop into Wykerton unexpectedly, where he knew Rosie would give him easy access to the "blind tiger" of the Wyker House. The boy carried a message also to Darley Champers to meet Jacobs at the top of the hill above Little Wolf where the trail with the scary little twist wound down by the opening to the creek, beyond which the Gimpke home was hidden. Then Hans Wyker, with threats of withholding the circus ticket and the ice cream, was told both messages just as they had been given to him for Rosie and Champers. Hans, for reasons of his own, hurried out of Wykerton and took the first train to Kansas City.

All this happened on the day that Darley Champers had made his trip to the Cloverdale Ranch. The fine spring weather of the morning leaped to summer heat in the afternoon, as often happens in the plains country. On the next day the heat continued, till late in the afternoon a vicious black storm cloud swirled suddenly up over the edge of the horizon, defying the restraining call of the three headlands to sheer off to the south, as storms usually sheered, and burst in fury on the Grass River Valley, extending east and north until the whole basin drained by Big Wolf was threshed with a cyclone's anger.

Darley Champers sat half asleep in his office on the afternoon of this day. His coat and vest were flung on a chair, his collar was on the floor under the desk, his sleeves were rolled above his elbows. The heat affected his big bulky frame grievously. The front door was closed to keep out the afternoon glare, but the rear door, showing the roomy back yard, was wide open, letting in whatever cool air might wander that way.

Darley was half conscious of somebody's presence as he dozed. He dreamed a minute or two, then suddenly his eyes snapped open just in time to see Thomas Smith entering through the rear doorway.

"How do you do?" The voice was between a whine and a snarl.

Champers stared and said nothing.

"It's too hot to be comfortable," Smith said, seating himself opposite Champers, "but you're looking well."

"You're not," Champers thought.

Thomas Smith was not looking well. Every mark of the down-hill road was on him, to the last and surest mark of poverty. The hang-dog expression of the face with its close-set eyes and crooked scar above them showed how far the evil life had robbed the man of power.

"I got in here yesterday morning, and you went out of town right away," Smith began.

"Yes, I seen you, and left immediately," Champers replied.

"Why do you dodge me? Is it because you know I can throw you? Or is it because I got full here once and beat you up a bit over in Wyker's place?" Smith asked smoothly, but with something cruel leaping up in his eyes.

"I didn't dodge you. I had business to see to and I hurried to it, so I wouldn't miss you this afternoon," Champers declared. "What do you want now?"

"Money, and I'm going to have it," Smith declared.

"Go get it, then!" Champers said coolly.

"You go get it for me, and go quick," Smith responded. "I'm in a bad fix, I needn't tell you. I've got to have money; it's what I live for."

"I believe you. It's all you ever did live for, and it's brought you where it'll bring any man danged soon enough who lives for it that way," Champers asserted.

"Since when did you join the Young Men's Christian Association?" Smith asked blandly.

"Since day before yesterday."

In spite of himself, Darley Champers felt his face flush deeply. He had just responded to a solicitation from that organization, assuring the solicitors that he "done it as a business man and not that he was any prayer meetin' exhorter, but the dollars was all cleaner'n a millionaire's, anyhow."

"I thought so," Smith went on. "Well, briefly, you have a good many things to keep covered, you know, and, likewise, so have your friends, the Shirleys. The girl paid about all the mortgage on that ranch, I find."

Darley Champers threw up his big hand.

"Don't bring her name in here," he demanded savagely.

"Oh, are you soft that way?" The sneer in the allusion was contemptible. "All the better; you will get me some money right away. Why, I haven't let you favor me in a long time. You'll be glad to do it now. Let me show you exactly how."

He paused a moment and the two looked steadily at each other, each seeming sure of his ground.

"You will go to these Shirleys," Smith continued, all the hate of years making the name bitter to him, "and you'll arrange that they mortgage up again right away, and you bring me the money. They can easy get three thousand on that ranch now, it's so well set to alfalfa. Nothing else will do but just that."

"And if I don't go?" Darley Champers asked.

"Oh, you'll go. You don't want this Y. M. C. A. crowd to know all I can tell. No, you don't. And Jim Shirley and that girl Leigh don't want me to publish all I know about the father and brother, Tank. It might be hard on both of 'em. Oh, I've got you all there. You can't get away from me and think because I'm hard up I have lost my grip on you. I'll never do that. I can disgrace you all so Grass River wouldn't wash your names clean again. So run along. You and the Shirleys will do as I say. You don't dare not to. And this pretty Leigh, such a gross old creature as you are fond of, she can work herself to skin and bone to pay off another mortgage to help Jim. Poor fellow can't work like most men, big as he is. I remember when he got started wrong in his lungs back in Ohio when he was a boy. He blamed Tank for shutting him out in the cold one night, or something like it. That give him his start. He always blamed Tank for everything. Why, he and Tank had a fight the last time they were together, and he nearly broke his brother's arm off—"

"Oh, shut up," Champers snapped out.

"Well, be active. I'll give you till tomorrow night; that's ample," Smith snapped back. "Hans and you are all the people in town who know I'm here now except the fat woman who waits on the table at Wyker's. I'm lying low right now, but I won't stay hid long; Wyker'll keep me over one more day, I reckon. Even he's turned against me when I've got no money to loan him, but I'll be on my feet again."

"Say, Smith, come in tomorrow night, but don't hurry away now." The big man's tone was too level to show which way his meaning ran. "I'd like to go into matters a little with you."

Smith settled back in his chair and waited with the air of one not to be coaxed.

"You are right in sayin' I'd like to hide some transactions. Not many real estate men went through the boom days here who don't need to feel that way. We was all property mad, and you and me and Wyker run our bluff same as any of 'em, an' we busted the spirit of the law to flinders. And our givin' and gettin' deeds and our buyin' tax titles an' forty things we done, was so irregular it might or mightn't stand in court now, dependin' altogether on how good a lawyer for technicalities we was able to employ. We know'd the game we was playin', too, and excused ourselves, thinkin' the Lord wouldn't find us special among so many qualified for the same game. Smith, I know danged well I'm not so 'shamed of that as I should be. The thing that hurts me wouldn't be cards for you at all. It's the brutal, inhumane things no law can touch me for; it's trying to do honest men out'n their freeholds; it's holdin' back them grasshopper sufferer supplies, an' havin' the very men I robbed treatin' me like a gentleman now, that's cutting my rhinoceros hide into strips and hangin' it on the fence. But you can't capitalize a thing like that in your business."

"Well, I know what I can do."

"As to what you can do to me, you've run that bluff till it's slick on the track. And I've know'd it just as long as you have, anyhow. Here's my particular stunt with you. I had business East in '96, time of the big May flood, and I run down to Cloverdale, Ohio, for a day. The waters was up higher'n they'd been know'd for some years."

Thomas Smith had stiffened in his chair and sat rigidly gripping the arms. But Champers seemed not to notice this as he continued:

"The fill where the railroad cuts acrost the old Aydelot farm was washed out and kep' down the back water from floodin' the low ground. But naturally it washed out considerable right there."

Smith's face was deadly pale now, with the crooked scar a livid streak across his forehead. Champers deliberated before he went on. All his blustering method disappeared and he kept to the even tone and unruffled demeanor.

"The danged little crick t'other side of town got rampageous late in the afternoon, and the whole crowd that had watched Clover Crick all day went pellmellin' off to see new sights, leavin' me entirely alone by the washout. I remember what you said about pretendin' to commit yourself to your Maker there in an agreement between you as cashier an' Tank Shirley, an' the place interested me a lot."

A finer-fibred man could hardly have resisted the agonized face of Thomas Smith. A cowardly nature would have feared the anger back of it.

"It was gettin' late and pretty cloudy still, and nobody by, an' I staid round, an' staid round, when just at the right place the bank broke away and I see the body of a man—just the skeleton mainly, right where you didn't commit your pretended suicide. Somebody committed it there for you evidently. There was only a few marks of identification, a big set ring with a jagged break in the set that swiped too swift acrost a man's face might leave a ugly scar for life, and if the fellow tried too hard to drown hisself he might wrench a man's right arm so out o' plum he couldn't never do much signin' his name again. I disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ain't been misrepresenting things to me a little as agent for Tank Shirley? Are you right sure you ain't Tank Shirley himself? I've kep' still for four years, not to save you nor myself, but to keep Leigh Shirley's name from bein' dragged into court 'longside a name like yours or mine. I never misuse the women, no matter how tricky I am with men."

Then, as an afterthought, Champers added:

"It's so danged hot this afternoon I can't get over to Grass River; and I got word to meet Jacobs over at the Little Wolf Ranch later, so I think I'll take the crooked trail up to that place; it's a lot the coolest road, and I'll wait till the sun's most down. I guess that three thousand dollar mortgage can wait over a day now, less you feel too cramped."

Thomas Smith rose from his chair. His face was ashy and his small black eyes burned with a wicked fire. He gave one long, steady look into Champers' face and slipped from the rear door like a shadow.

Darley Champers knew he had won the day, and no sense of personal danger had ever troubled him. He settled back in his chair, drew a long sigh of relief, and soon snored comfortably through his afternoon's nap.

When he awoke it was quite dark, for the storm cloud covered the sky and the hot breath from the west was like the air from a furnace mouth.

"It's not late, but it's danged hot. I wonder why that Jew wanted me to meet him over there. Couldn't he have come here? I'm wet with sweat now. How'll I be by the time I get out to that ranch?" Champers stretched his limbs and mopped his hot neck with his handkerchief. "I reckon I'd better go, though. Jacobs always knows why he wants a thing. And he's the finest man ever came out of Jewey. With him in town and Asher Aydelot on a farm, no city nor rural communities could be more blessed."

Then he remembered Thomas Smith and a cold shiver seized his big, perspiring body.

"I wonder why I dread to go," he said, half aloud. "The creek trail will be cool, but, golly, I'm danged cold right now."

Again his mind ran to Smith's face as he had seen it last. He put on his hat and started to take his long raincoat off the hook behind the rear door.

"Reckon I'd better take it. It looks like storming," he muttered. "Hello! What the devil!"

For Rosie Gimpke, with blazing cheeks and hair dripping with perspiration, was hidden behind the coat.

"Oh, Mr. Champers, go queek and find Yon Yacob, but don't go the creek roat. I coom slippin' to tell you to go sure, and I hit when that strange man coom slippin' in. I hear all you say, an' I see him troo der crack here, an' he stant out there a long time looking back in here. So I half to wait an' you go nappin' an' I still wait. I wait to say, hurry, but don't go oop nor down der creek trail. I do anything for Miss Shirley, an' I like you for takin' care off her goot name; goot names iss hardt to get back if dey gets avay. Hurry."

"Heaven bless your good soul!" Champers said heartily. "But why not take the cool road? I've overslept and I've got to hurry and the storm's hustling in."

"Don't, please don't take it," Rosie begged.

The next minute she was gone and as Champers closed and locked his doors he said to himself, "She does her work like a hero and never will have any credit for it, 'cause she's not a pioneer nor a soldier. But she has saved more than one poor fellow snared into that joint I winked at for years."

Then, obedient to her urging, he followed the longer, hotter road toward the Jacobs' stock ranch bordering on Little Wolf Creek.

Meantime, John Jacobs inspected his property, forgetful of the intense heat and the coming storm, his mind full of a strange foreboding. At the top of the hill above where the road wound down through deep shadows he sat a long while on his horse. "I wonder what makes me so lonely this evening," he mused. "I'm not of a lonely nature, nor morose, thank the Lord! There's no telling why we do or don't want to do things. I wonder where Champers is. He ought to be coming up pretty soon. I wonder if I hadn't had that dream two nights ago about that picture I saw in a book, when I was a little chap, if I'd had this fool's cowardice about being out here alone today. And what was it that made me look over all those papers in my vault box last night? I have helped Careyville some, and the library I built will have a good endowment when I'm gone, and so will the children's park, and the Temperance Societies. Maybe I've not lived in vain, if I have been an exacting Jew. I never asked for the blood in my pound of flesh, anyhow. I wonder where Champers can be."

He listened intently and thought he heard someone coming around the bend down the darkening way.

"That's he, I guess, now," he said.

Then he turned his face toward the wide prairie unrolling to the westward. Overhanging it were writhing clouds, hurled hither and thither, twisted, frayed, and burst asunder by the titanic forces of the upper air, and all converging with centripetal violence toward one vast maelstrom. Its long, funnel-shaped form dipped and lifted, trailing back and forth like some sensate thing. With it came an increasing roar from the clashing of timber up the valley. The vivid shafts of lightning and the blackness that followed them made the scene terrific with Nature's majestic madness.

"I must get shelter somewhere," Jacobs said. "I am sorry Champers failed me. I wanted his counsel before I slipped up on Wyker tonight. I thought I heard him coming just now. Maybe he's waiting for me under cover. I'll go down and see."

The roar of the cyclone grew louder and the long swinging funnel lifted and dipped and lifted again, as the awful forces of the air hurled it onward.

Down at the sharp bend in the road Thomas Smith was crouching, just where the rift in the bank opened to the creek, and the face of the man was not good to look upon nor to remember.

"I'll show Darley Champers how well my left hand works. There'll be no telltale scar left on his face when I'm through, and he can tumble right straight down to the water from here and on to hell, and Wyker's joint may bear the blame. Damned old Dutchman, to turn me out now. I set him up in business when I had money. Here comes Champers now."

The storm-cloud burst upon the hill at that moment. John Jacobs' horse leaped forward on the steep slope, slid, and fell to its knees. As it sprang up again the two men could not see each other, for a flash of lightning blinded them and in the crash of thunder that burst at the same instant, filling the valley with deafening roar, the sharp report of a double pistol-shot was swallowed up.

* * * * *

An hour later Darley Champers, drenched with rain, stumbled down the crooked trail in the semi-darkness. The cool air came fanning out of the west and a faint rift along the horizon line gave promise of a glorious April sunset.

As Darley reached the twist in the trail which John Jacobs always dreaded, the place Thaine Aydelot and Leigh Shirley had invested with sweet memories, he suddenly drew his rein and stared in horror.

Lying in the rift with his head toward the deep waters of Little Wolf Creek lay Thomas Smith, scowling with unseeing eyes at the fast clearing sky. While on the farther side of the road lay the still form of John Jacobs, rain-beaten and smeared with mud, as if he had struggled backward in his death-throes.

As Champers bent tenderly over him, the smile on his lips took away the awfulness of the sight, and the serenity of the rain-drenched face rested as visible token of an abundant entrance into eternal peace.

Grass River and Big Wolf settlements had never before known a tragedy so appalling as the assassination of John Jacobs at the hands of an "unknown" man. Hans Wyker had gone to Kansas City on the day before the event and Wykerton never saw his face again. Rosie Gimpke, who did not know the stranger's name, and Darley Champers, who thought he did, believed nothing could be gained by talking, so they held their peace. And Thomas Smith went "unknown" back to the dust of the prairie in the Grass River graveyard.

The coroner tried faithfully to locate the blame. But as Jacobs was unarmed and was shot from the front, and the stranger had only one bullet in his revolver and was shot from behind, and as nobody lost nor gained by not untangling the mystery, the affair after a nine days' complete threshing, went into local history, the place of sepulchre.



CHAPTER XXI

JANE AYDELOT'S WILL

Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act, And make her generous thought a fact, Keeping with many a light disguise The secret of self-sacrifice, O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best That Heaven itself could give thee—rest. —Snow Bound.

Darley CHAMPERS sat in his little office absorbed in business. The May morning was ideal. Through the front door the sounds of the street drifted in. Through the rear door the roomy backyard, which was Champers' one domestic pleasure, sent in an odor of white lilac. By all the rules Champers should have preferred hollyhocks and red peonies, if he had cared for flowers at all. It was for the memory of the old mother, whom he would not turn adrift to please a frivolous wife, that he grew the white blossoms she had loved. But as he never spoke of her, nor seemed to see any other flowers, nobody noticed the peculiarity.

"I wonder how I missed that mail?" he mused, as he turned a foreign envelope in his hands. "I reckon the sight of that poor devil, Smith, dropping into town so suddenly five days ago upset me so I forgot my mail and went to see the Shirleys. And the hot afternoon and Smith's coming in here, and—"Darley leaned back in his chair and sighed.

"Poor Jacobs! Why should he be taken? Smith was gunning for me and mistook his man. Lord knows I wasn't fit to go."

He leaned his elbow heavily on the table, resting his head on his hand.

"If Jacobs went on in my place, sacrificed for my sins, so help me God, I'll carry on his work here. I'll fight the liquor business to the end of my days. There shan't no joint nor doggery never open a door on Big Wolf no more. I'll do a man's part for the world I've been doin' for my own profit most of my life."

His brow cleared, and a new expression came to the bluff countenance. The humaneness within him was doing its perfect work.

"But about this mail, now." He took up the letter again. "Carey says he ain't coming back. Him and young Aydelot's dead sure to go to China soon. An' I'm to handle his business as per previous directions. This is the first of it. Somebody puttin' on mournin' style, I reckon."

Champers took up a black-edged envelope, whose contents told him as Dr. Horace Carey's representative that Miss Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale was no longer living and much more as unnecessary to the business of the moment as a black-bordered envelope is unnecessary to the business of life. Then he opened a drawer in his small office safe and took out a bundle of letters.

"Here's a copy of her will. That's to go to Miss Shirley to read. An' a copy of old Francis Aydelot's will. What's the value of that, d' you reckon? Also to be showed to Miss Leigh Shirley. An' here's—what?"

Darley Champers opened the last envelope and began to read. He stopped suddenly and gave a long surprised whistle.

Beautiful as the morning was, the man laid down the papers, carefully locked both doors and drew down the front blinds. He took up the envelope and read its contents. He read them a second time. Then he put down the neatly written pages and sat staring at nothing for a long time. He took them up at length for a third reading.

"Everything comes out at last," he murmured. "Oh, Lord, I'm glad Doc Carey got hold of me when he did."

Slowly he ran his eyes down the lines as he read in a half whisper:

I was walking down the National pike road toward Cloverdale with little Leigh in the twilight. Where the railroad crosses Clover Creek on the high fill we saw Tank Shirley and the young cashier, Terrence Smalley, who had disappeared after the bank failure. It seems Tank had promised to pay Smalley to stay away and to find Jim and get his property away from him. Evidently Tank had not kept his word, for they were quarreling and came to blows until the cashier's face was cut and bleeding above the eye. There was a struggle, and one pushed the other over the bank into the deep water there. Little as Leigh was, she knew one of the men was her father, and we thought he had pushed Smalley into the creek. He had a sort of paralyzed arm and could not swim. I tried to make her forget all about it. I promised her my home and farm some day if she would never tell what she had seen. She shut her lips, but if she forgot, I cannot tell.

That night I went alone to the fill and found Terrence Smalley with a cut face and a twisted shoulder lying above the place where Tank went down. I helped him to my home and dressed his wounds. I may have done wrong not to deliver him to the authorities, but he had a bad story to tell of Tank's bank record that would have disgraced the Shirley family in Ohio, so we made an agreement. He would never make himself known to Leigh, nor in any way disturb her life nor reveal anything of her father's life to disgrace her name, if I let him go. And I agreed not to report what I had seen, nor to tell what I knew to his hurt. He promised me also never to show his face in Cloverdale again. He was a selfish, dishonest man, who used Tank Shirley's hatred of his brother and his other sins to hide his own wrongdoing. But I tried to do my duty by the innocent ones who must suffer, when I turned him loose with his conscience. I do not know what has become of him, but, so far as I do know, he has kept the secret of Tank Shirley's crooked dealing with the Cloverdale bank, and he has never annoyed Leigh, nor brought any disgrace to her name. This statement duly witnessed, etc.

Slowly Darley Champers read. Then, laying down the pages, he said as slowly: "'Unknown' in the Grass River graveyard. 'Unknown' to Jim Shirley and Asher Aydelot, whose eyes he'd never let see him. I understand now, why. Known to me as Thomas Smith, an escaped defaultin' bank cashier who didn't commit suicide. Known to the late Miss Aydelot as Tank Shirley's murderer. If the devil knows where to git on the track of that scoundrel an' locate him properly in hell, he'll do it without my help. By the Lord Almighty, I'll never tell what I know. An' this paper goes to ashes here. Oh, Caesar! If I could only burn up the recollection that I was ever low-down an' money-grubbin' enough to collute with such as him for business. I'm danged glad I had that quarter kep' in Leigh's name 'stead of Jim's. That's why Thomas Smith threatened and didn't act. He didn't dare to go against Leigh as long as Jane Aydelot was livin'."

He stuck a blazing match to the letter and watched it crumple to ashes on the rusty stove-hearth. Then he carefully swept the ashes on a newspaper, and, opening his doors again, he scattered them in the dusty main street of Wykerton.

That afternoon Champers went again to the Cloverdale Ranch. Leigh was alone, busy with her brushes and paint-board in the seat on the lawn where Thaine Aydelot had found her on the summer day painting sunflowers. The first little sunflower was blooming now by the meadow fence.

"Don't git up, Miss Shirley. Keep your seat, mom. I dropped in on a little business. I'm glad to set out here."

Champers took off his hat and fanned his red face as he sat on the ground and looked out at the winding river bordered by alfalfa fields.

"Nice stand you got out there." He pointed with his hat toward the fields. "Where's Jim?"

"He and Asher Aydelot have gone to Careyville to settle some of John Jacobs' affairs. They and Todd Stewart are named as trustees in the will," Leigh replied.

She had laid aside her brushes and sat with her hands folded in her lap. Champers pulled up a spear of blue-grass and chewed it thoughtfully. At length he said:

"Yes, I knew that. Jacobs left no end of things in the way of property for me to look after. I'll report to them now. I seem to be general handy man. Doc Carey left matters with me, too."

"Yes?" Leigh said courteously.

"Well, referrin' to that matter regardin' your father we spoke of the other day, I find, through Doc Carey's helpin' an' some other ways, that your father, Mr. Tank Shirley, was accidentally drowned in Clover Creek, Ohio, some years ago. So far as I can find out, he died insolvent. If I discover anything further, I'll let you know."

Leigh sat very still, her eyes on the far-away headlands that seemed like blue cloud banks at the moment.

"Had you heard of Miss Jane Aydelot's demise? I reckon you had, of course. But do you know what her intentions were?"

Leigh looked steadily at her questioner. All her life she had had a way of keeping her own counsel, nor was it ever easy to know what her thoughts might be.

"Miss Shirley, the late Miss Jane Aydelot trusted Doc Carey to look after her affairs. Doc Carey, he trusted me to take his place. Can you trust me to be the last link of the chain in doin' her business? My grammar's poor, but my hands is clean now, thank the Lord!"

"Yes, Mr. Champers, I am sure of your uprightness."

Leigh did not dream how grateful these words were to the man before her, honestly trying to beat back to better ideals of life.

"When I was a very little girl," Leigh went on, "Miss Jane told me I was to be her heir."

Darley gave a start, but as Leigh's face was calm, he could only wonder how much she had remembered.

"All the years since I've lived in Kansas I've been kept in mind in many ways of her favor toward me. I came to know long ago that she was determined to leave me all the old Aydelot estate. And I knew also that it should have been Asher's, not mine."

Darley thought of Thaine, and, dull as he was, he read in a flash a romance that many a finer mind might have missed.

"Well, sufferin' catfish!" he said to himself. "Danged plucky girl; forges along an' bucks me into sellin' her this ranch an' sets it into alfalfy an' sets up Jim Shirley for life, 'cause putterin' in the garden an' bein' kind to the neighbors is the limit to that big man's endurance. An' this pretty girl, knowin' that Aydelot property ought to be Thaine Aydelot's, just turns it down, an', by golly, I'll bet she turns him down, too, fearin' he wouldn't feel like takin' it. An' he's clear hiked to the edges of Chiny. Well, it's a danged queer world. I'm glad I've only got Darley Champers to look out for. The day I see them two drivin' out of Wykerton towards Little Wolf, the time she'd closed the Cloverdale ranch deal, I knowed the white lilac mother used to love was sweeter in my back lot."

"I could not take Miss Jane's property and be happy," Leigh went on. "Besides, I can earn a living. See what my brushes can do, and see the secret I learned in the Coburn book."

Leigh held up the sketch she was finishing, then pointed to the broad alfalfa acres, refreshingly green in the May sunlight.

"Well, I brought down a copy of the late Miss Aydelot's will that she left with Doc Carey, who is goin' to Chiny in a few days, him an' Thaine Aydelot, Doc writes me. An' you can look over it. I've got to go to Cloverdale next week an' settle things there, an' see that the probatin's are straight. Lemme hear from you before I go. I must be gettin' on. Danged fine country, this Grass River Valley. Who'd a' thought it back in the seventies when Jim Shirley an' Asher Aydelot squatted here? Goodday."

Left alone, Leigh Shirley opened the big envelope holding the will of Francis Aydelot and read in it the stern decree that no child of Virginia Thaine should inherit the Aydelot estate in Ohio.

"That's why Miss Jane couldn't leave it to Asher's son," she murmured.

Then she read the will of the late Jane Aydelot. When she lifted her face from its pages, her fair cheeks were pink with excitement, her deep violet eyes were shining, her lips were parted in a glad smile. She went down to the meadow fence and plucked the first little golden sunflower from its stem, and stood holding it as she looked away to where the three headlands stood up clear and shimmering in the light of the May afternoon. That night two letters were hurried to the postoffice. One went no farther than Wykerton to tell Darley Champers that Leigh would heartily approve of any action he might take in the business that was taking him to Ohio.



CHAPTER XXII

THE FARTHER WILDERNESS

And beyond the baths of sunset found new worlds. —London.

Dr. Carey and Thaine Aydelot sat watching the play of a fountain in a moonlit garden of tropical loveliness. In the Manila hospital Thaine had gone far down the Valley of the Shadow of Death before he reached a turning point. But youth, good blood, a constitution seasoned by camp and field, the watchful care of his physician, and the blessing of the Great Physician, from whom is all health, at last prevailed, and he came back sturdily to life and strength.

As the two men sat enjoying the hour Dr. Carey suddenly asked:

"After this hospital service, what next?"

"How soon does this involuntary servitude end?" Thaine inquired.

"A fortnight will do all that is possible for us," Carey answered.

"Then I'll enlist with the regulars," Thaine declared.

"Do you mean to follow a military life?" Carey inquired, bending forward to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play of moonbeams on his silvery hair.

"No, not always," Thaine responded.

"Then why don't you go home now?" Carey went on.

Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to his full height, the strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face the firing line had graven a nobility the old brown Kansas prairies had never seen.