He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with the soil. At length he said slowly:

"Dr. Carey, when I saw Lieutenant Alford brought in I counted the cost again. Only American ideals of government and civilization can win this wilderness. For this Alford's blood was shed. He wrote to his mother on Christmas day that he was studying here to get his Master's Degree from the Kansas University. I saw him just after he had received his diploma for that Degree. I was a fairly law-abiding civilian. The first shot of the campaign last February began in me what Alford's sacrifice completed. I am waiting to see what next. But I have one thing firmly fixed now. Warfare only opens the way for the wilderness winners to come in and make a kingdom. The Remington rifle runs back the frontier line; the plowshare holds the land at last. I want, when my service here is done, to go back to the wheatfields and the cornfields. I want to smell the alfalfa and see the prairie windbreaks and be king of a Kansas farm. I've lost my ambition for gold lace. I want a bigger mental ring of growth every year, and I believe the biggest place for me to get this will be with my feet on the prairie sod. Meantime, I shall reenlist, as I said."

"Sit down, Thaine, and let me ask you one question," Dr. Carey said.

The young man dropped to his seat again.

"When your service is done is there anything to hold you from going straight to the Grass River Valley again?"

Thaine leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head while he looked steadily at the splashing waters before him as he said frankly:

"Yes, there is. When I go back I want Leigh Shirley—and it's no use wanting."

"Thaine, you were a law-abiding civilian at home. The university made you a student. You came out here a fearless soldier to fight your country's enemies. Alford's death made you a patriot who would plant American ideals in these islands. May I tell you that there is still one more lesson to learn?"

Thaine looked up inquiringly.

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. Then the call to duty will be a bugle note of victory wherever that duty may be. You needn't hunt for opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now from out of the Unknown."

The fine head with the heavy masses of white hair seemed halo-crowned at that moment. It was as he appeared that night that Thaine Aydelot always remembers him. Two weeks later Thaine enlisted in the Fourteenth United States Infantry, stationed in Luzon. Dr. Carey was also enrolled in its hospital staff. In July the regiment was ordered from the Philippines to join the allied armies of the World Powers at Tien-Tsin in a northern Chinese province, where the Boxer forces were massing about Peking. And Thaine's opportunity for learning his greatest lesson came hurrying toward him from out of the Unknown.

This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China, it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first, it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers. Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out every idea of modern life and thought in China; every occidental invention, every progressive method of society, every scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity. And especially did it aim to put to death every native Chinese Christian, to massacre every missionary of the Christ, and to drive out or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening—its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native Christians and hundreds of foreigners were brutally massacred. At last it centered its strength about the great city of Peking. And a faint, smothered wail for deliverance came from the Foreign Legation shut in behind beleaguered walls inside that city to starve or perish at the hands of the bloody Boxers.

Very patiently the World Powers waited and warned the Chinese leaders of a day of retribution. Fanatics are fanatics because they cannot learn. The conditions only whetted the Boxers to greater barbarity. They believed themselves invincible and they laughed to scorn all thought of foreign interference. Then came the sword of the Lord and of Gideon to the battle lines at Tien-Tsin on the Peiho River, as it came once long ago to the valley of Jezreel.

In the mid-afternoon of an August day Thaine Aydelot heard the bugle note calling the troops to marching order. Thaine was fond of the bugler, a little fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Kemper, because he remembered that Asher Aydelot had been a drummer boy once when he was no older than "Little Kemper," as the regiment called him.

"I wish you were where my father is now, Kemper," Thaine said as the boy skipped by him.

"Where's that? It can't be hell or he'd be with us," Little Kemper replied.

"No, he's in Kansas," Thaine said.

"Oh, that's right next door to heaven, but I can't go just yet. There's too much doing here," the little bugler declared as he hurried away.

Young as he was, Little Kemper was the busiest member of the regiment. Life with him was a continual "doing" and he did it joyously and well.

"There's something doing here." Thaine hardly had time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of dreadful warfare.

As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley's patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch. And even in the face of such big things as he was on his way to meet the conquest of the prairie soil seemed wonderful.

Big things were waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. Not wonderful in numbers, for there were only sixteen thousand of the allied armies, all told, to pit themselves against an armed force able to line up one hundred and sixteen thousand against them. Not numbers, but varying nationalities, varying races, strange confusion of tongues, with one common purpose binding all into one body, made the company forming on the banks of the Peiho a wonderful one.

Thaine's regiment was drawn up at an angle with the line, ready to fall into its place among the reserves, and the young Kansan watched the flower of the world's soldiery file along the way.

In the front were the little brown Japanese Cavalry, Artillery, and Infantry—men who in battle make dying as much their business as living. Beside these were the English forces, the Scotch Highlanders, the Welsh Fusiliers, the Royal Artillery, all in best array. Behind them the Indian Empire troops, the Sikh Infantry with a sprinkling of Sepoys and the Mounted Bengalese Lancers. Then followed, each in its place, the Italian marines and foot soldiery, the well-groomed French troops from all branches of the military; the stalwart, fair-haired Germans, soldiers to a finish in weight and training; the Siberian Cossacks and the Russian Infantry and Cavalry, big, brutal looking men whom women of any nation might fear. In reserve at the last of the line were the American forces, the Ninth and Fourteenth Regiments of Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry, and F Battery of the Fifth Artillery.

So marched the host from Tien-Tsin along the sandy plains, led on by one purpose, to reach the old city of Peking and save the lives of the foreign citizens shut up inside their compound—whether massacred, or living, starved, and tortured, this allied army then could not know.

The August day was intensely hot, with its hours made grievous by a heavy, humid air, and the sand and thick dust ground and flung up in clouds by sixteen thousand troops, with all the cavalry hoofs and artillery wheels. It was only a type of the ten days that followed, wherein heat and dust and humid air, and thirst—burning, maddening thirst—joined together against the brave soldiery fighting not for fortune, nor glory, nor patriotism, but for humanity.

As they tramped away in military order, Thaine Aydelot said to his nearest comrade:

"Goodrich, I saw a familiar German face up in the line."

"Friend of yours the Emperor sent out to keep you company?" Goodrich inquired with a smile.

"No, a Kansas joint-keeper named Hans Wyker. What do you suppose put him against the Boxers?"

"Oh, the army is the last resort for some men. It's society's clearing house," Goodrich replied.

The speaker was a Harvard man, a cultured gentleman, in civil life a University Professor. The same high purpose was in his service that controlled Thaine Aydelot now.

"I don't like being at the tail-end of this procession," a big German from the Pennsylvania foundries declared, as he trudged sturdily along under the blazing sun. The courage in his determined face and his huge strength would warrant him a place in the front line anywhere.

"Nor I, Schwoebel," Thaine declared. "I came out with Funston's 'Fighting Twentieth.' I'm used to being called back, not tolled along after the rear."

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" roared Schwoebel in a tremendous bellow.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" a Pennsylvania University man named McLearn followed Schwoebel.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" went down the whole line of infantry.

The old Kansas University yell, taken to the Philippines by college men, became the battle cry of the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, who when they returned to civil life, left it there for the American, army—and "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" became the American watchword and cry of all that "far flung battle line" marching on through dust and heat to rescue the imperiled Christians in a beleagured fortress inside the impregnable city of Peking.

"You needn't worry about the rear, Aydelot. One engagement may whip this line about, end to end, or it may scale off all that's in front of us and leave nothing but the rear. All this before we have time to change collars again. We'll let you or Tasker here lead into Peking," an Indiana University man declared.

"That's good of you, Binford. Some Kansas man will be first to carry the flag into Peking. It might as well be Aydelot."

This from Tasker, a slender young fellow from a Kansas railroad office.

So they joked as they tramped along. It was nearly midnight when they pitched camp before the little village of Peit-Tsang beside the Peiho.

In the dim dawning of the August morning Little Kemper's bugle sounded the morning reveille. Thaine was just dreaming of home and he thought the first bugle note was the call for him up the stairway of the Sunflower Inn. His windows looked out on the Aydelot wheatfields and the grove beyond, and every morning the sunrise across the level eastern prairie made a picture only the hand of the Infinite could paint. This morning he opened his eyes on a far different scene. The reveille became a call to arms and the troops fell into line ready for battle.

Before the sun had reached the zenith the line was whipped end to end, as Binford of Indiana had said it might be. In this engagement on the sandy plain about the little village of Peit-Tsang, Thaine with his comrades saw what it meant to lead that battle line. He saw the brave little Japanese mowed down like standing grain before the reaper's sickle. He saw the ranks move swiftly up to take the places of the fallen, never wavering nor retreating, rushing to certain death as to places of vantage in a coronal pageantry. The Filipino's Mauser was as deadly as the older style gun of the Boxer. A bullet aimed true does a bullet's work. But in this battle that raged about Peit-Tsang Thaine quickly discovered that this was no fight in a Filipino jungle. Here was real war, as big and terrible above the campaigns he had known in Luzon as the purpose in it was big above loyalty to the flag and extension of American dominion and ideals.

When the thing was ended with the routing of the Boxer forces, of the sixteen thousand that went into battle a tithe of one-tenth of their number lay dead on the plains—sixteen hundred men, the cost of conquest in a far wilderness. The heaviest toll fell on the brave Japanese who had led in the attack.

Thaine Aydelot did not dream of home that night. He slept on his arms the heavy sleep of utter weariness, which Little Kemper's bugle call broke at three o'clock the next morning. Before the August sun had crawled over the eastern horizon the armies were swinging up the Peiho river toward Peking. The American troops were leading the column now, as Thaine Aydelot had wished they might, and in all that followed after the day at Peit-Tsang the Stars and Stripes, brave token of a brave people, floated above the front lines of soldiery, even to the end of the struggle.

It was high noon above the Orient, where the Peiho flows beside the populous town of Yang-Tsun. The Boxer army routed by the battle of Peit-Tsang had massed its front before the town, a formidable array in numbers, equipment, and frenzied eagerness to halt here and forever the poor little line of foreign soldiers creeping in upon it from the sea. The Boxers knew that they could match the fighting strength of this line with quadruple force. The troops coming toward them had marched twelve miles under the August heat of a hundred degrees, through sand and alkali dust, in the heavy humid air saturated with evil odors. They had had no food since the night before, nor a drink of water since daydawn. Joyful would it be to slaughter here the entire band and then rush back to the hoary old City of Peking with the triumphant message that the Allied Armies of the World had fallen before China. Then the death of every foreigner in the Empire would be certain.

At noon the battle lines were formed. In the swinging into place as Thaine Aydelot stood beside Tasker, surrounded by his comrades, Little Kemper dashed by him.

"Here's where the corn-fed Kansans do their work," he said gaily to the Kansas men.

"With a few bean-eaters from Boston to help," Goodrich responded.

"And a Hoosier to give them culture," Binford added.

"Yes, yes, with the William Penn Quakers and the Pennsylvania Dutch," Schwoebel roared, striking McLearn on the shoulder.

Men think of many things as the battle breaks, but never do they fight less bravely because they have laughed the moment before.

Thaine was in the very front of the battle lines. In the pause before the first onslaught he thought of many things confusedly and a few most vividly. He thought of Leigh Shirley and her childish dream of Prince Quippi in China—the China just beyond the purple notches. He thought of his mother as she had looked that spring morning when he talked of enlisting for the Spanish War. He thought of his father, who had never known fear in his life. Of his last words:

"As thy days so shall thy strength be."

And keenly he remembered Dr. Carey, somewhere among the troops behind him. The fine head crowned with white hair, caressed by the moonbeams, as he had seen it in the Manila garden, and his earnest words:

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. You need not hunt for the opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now out of the Unknown."

"It is here, the opportunity," he murmured. "Oh, God, make me a fit soldier for Thy service."

He did not pray for safety from danger and death; he asked for fitness to serve and in that moment his great lesson was learned. There came an instant's longing for Dr. Carey; then the battle storm burst and he did not think any more, he fought. It were useless to picture that struggle.

Nothing counts in warfare till the results are shown. For six hours the fighting did not cease, and not at Valley Forge, nor Brandywine, Lake Erie, nor Buena Vista, Gettysburg, nor Shiloh, San Juan Hill, nor in any jungle in Luzon did the American flag stream out over greater heroes than it led today on the plains beside the Peiho river before Yang-Tsun.

At last the firing ceased, the smoke lifted above the field; the Boxers, gathering their shattered forces together, retreated again before the little line of Allied Troops invading this big strange land. And the last hours of that long hot day waned to eventide.

There were only a few of its events that Thaine could comprehend. He knew Little Kemper had received his death wound, blowing his bugle calls again and again after he had been stricken, till the last reveille sounded for him. The plucky little body with the big soul, who had found his brief fifteen years of life so full of "doing."

Thaine knew that in the thick of the fight the native Indian Infantry, the Sikhs and Sepoys, had fallen in cowardly fear before the Boxer fire. He remembered how big Schwoebel, and Tasker, and Binford, Goodrich, and McLearn, with himself and another man whom he recalled afterward as Boehringer, a Kansas man, had clubbed self-respect into a few of them and kicked the other whining cowards from their way. He knew that Schwoebel had been grievously wounded and was being taken back to Tien-Tsin with many other brave fellows who had been stricken that day. He knew that near the last of the fray a man whom he had admired and loved second to Lieutenant Alford, big Clint Graham, of a royally fine old family of state builders in far-away Kansas, had fallen by the mistaken shot of Russian cannon, and the weight of that loss hung heavy about the edge of his consciousness wherever he turned. But what followed the battle Thaine Aydelot will never forget.

Twelve hundred men rose no more from that bloody field before Yang-Tsun. The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to Peking.

All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day's twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting. Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield.

"We must help these fellows," Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for water went up from wounded men.

"The river is this way," McLearn declared. "Hurry! the boys are dying."

So over countless forms they hurried to the river's brink for water. Thaine and Tasker and Boehringer were accustomed to muddy streams, for the prairie waters are never clear. But Goodrich from Boston had a memory of mountain brooks. The Pennsylvania man, McLearn, the cold springs of the Alleghanies, and for Binford there was old Broad Ripple out beyond Indianapolis. All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their canteens.

* * * * *

"You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian."

Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine's mental sight.

"Vasser! Vasser!" cried a big German soldier before him.

Thaine stooped to give him a drink, and as he lifted up the man's head he saw the stained face of Hans Wyker.

"It's very goot," Hans murmured, licking his lips for more. "Wisky not so goot as vasser," and then he trailed off into a delirium. "Don't tell. Don't tell," he pleaded. "I neffer mean to get Schmitt. I not know he would be der yet. I hide for Yacob, an' I get Schmitt in der back and I only want Yacob. He send me to der pen for sure yet next time. I hate Yon Yacob."

A little silence, then Hans murmured:

"I didn't go to Kansas City. I coom back to Gretchen's home by Little Wolf. I hide where I watch for Yacob. I shoot twice to be sure of Yacob, an' Schmitt, hidin' in der crack by der roat, get one shot. So I coom to Yermany and enlist. Gretchen, she coom too an' she stay der. Vell! I help fight Boxer some. Mine Gott, forgif me. I do once some goot for der world dis day."

And that was the last of Wyker.

The twilight hour was near. The wounded had been borne away by busy Red Cross angels of mercy. Wide away across the Chinese plain the big red sun slipped down the amber summer sky into a bath of molten flame. Then out of sight behind the edge of the world it turned all the west into one magnificent surge of scarlet glory, touching to beauty the tiny gray cloud flecks far away to the eastward; while long rivers of golden light by rivers of roseate glow mingled at last along the zenith in one vast sweep of mother-of-pearl. A cool breeze came singing in from the sea—fanning the fevered faces of the weary soldiers. The desolate places were hidden by the deepening shadows, and the serenity of the twilight hour fell on the battlefield.

Then the men of each nationality went out to bury their dead. Swiftly the little brown Japanese digged and filled up the graves into which their comrades were deftly heaped. The Russian and Siberian Cossack lunged their fallen ones in heavily and unfeelingly. The Bengalese and Sikhs thrust their own out of sight as they were planting for an uncertain harvest. Each soldier from France who lost his life on that battlefield fell on his own grave and there his countrymen covered him over, an unmarked spot in a foreign land.

Thaine straightened a minute above his spade. The cool breezes were grateful to his heated brow. The after-sunset glow seemed like the benediction of the Infinite on the closing act of the day. He saw the hurried and unfeeling dumping of bodies into the holes awaiting them. Then his heart grew big with something unspeakable as he noted how in all that irreverent and unsympathetic action the American and English soldiery alone were serving as brother for brother. In the long trenches prepared for them their dead were laid with reverent dignity and gentleness. Each one's place was carefully marked with a numbered slab that in a future day the sacred dust might be carried back to the soil of the homeland. As the sunset deepened to richer coloring and the battlefield grew still and still, far along the lines the bands of the English Royal Artillery and the Welsh Fusiliers, with the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlanders, mingled their music with the music of the splendid band of the Fourteenth American Infantry in the sweet and sacred strains of the beloved old hymn:

Nearer, my God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee. E'en though it be a cross That raiseth me. Still all my song shall be Nearer, my God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee.

And Thaine Aydelot knew that his last and biggest lesson was learned.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE END OF THE WILDERNESS

Have I named one single river? Have I claimed one single acre? Have I kept one single nugget (barring samples)? No, not I. Because my price was paid me ten times over by my Maker. But you wouldn't understand it. You go up and occupy. —The Explorer.

The victory at Yang-Tsun had come with a tremendous loss of life. To go on now promised the cutting to pieces of the entire army. To stay here and await reinforcements would mean the slaughter of all the foreigners in Peking. In a council of war the next day English and Indian, Russian, German, Japanese, Italian, and French, general after general declared for the wisdom of waiting at Yang-Tsun for reinforcements.

Up spoke then General Chaffee of the American command:

"I will not wait while the Boxers massacre the helpless Christians. Stay here or go back to your own countries, as you please. My army will go on to Peking, if it must go alone."

And his will prevailed.

Followed then a memorable march, with the Stars and Stripes ever leading the line. The strength of the force was thirteen thousand now and one thousand of these fell by the way before the end of the journey.

After Yang-Tsun, for the only time in this ten days' campaign, the soldiers undressed and bathed themselves like Christians in the unchristian Peiho, and on the next day, which was the Sabbath, they listened to the military chapel service. Six days they forged onward with the same cruel heat, and scalding air, and alkali dust, and poison water, over dreary plains, through deserted villages, twenty, twenty-five, and even thirty miles a day, they pushed on toward the Chinese capital.

And ever before them the Boxers slowly receded, stinging grievously as they moved. Sure were they that at last only dire calamity could await that slender column moving across the plains, led under a flag of red, white, and blue, with bands ever playing The Star-Spangled Banner, while from line on line rolled out that weird battle cry of "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" Sure were they that this stubborn little bands of soldiers foolishly following the receding Boxer must at last crush itself like dead-ripe fruit against the ancient and invincible walls of Peking.

On the evening of the sixth day from Yang-Tsun the twelve thousand men of the Allied Armies, flower of the world's soldiery, stumbled into camp with their outposts in sight of the great walls of the City of Peking. This had been the longest and hottest of all the days, with the weariest length of march. A great storm cloud was rising in the west and the air hung hot and still before it.

Thaine Aydelot and his comrades threw themselves down, too exhausted to care for what might happen next.

"This is the hottest day I ever knew," declared McLearn wearily, as he lay prone on the ground looking up at the hot sky with unblinking eyes.

"I reckon you never hit the National pike on an August day, out between Green Castle and Terre Haute down in Indianny," Binford suggested.

"Nor St. Marys-by-the-Kaw," Boehringer, a Kansas man, added. "There's where you get real summery weather."

"Oh, kill him, Aydelot, he's worse than a Boxer. Don't you know I'm from Boston originally, which is only a State of Mind?" Goodrich urged.

"No matter what state you are from originally, you are in China now, which is in a state of insurrection that we must get ready for a state of resurrection tomorrow. What are you thinking about, T. Aydelot? You look like Moses and the prophets." McLearn half turned over with the question.

Thaine, who was lying on his side, supporting his head on his hand, quoted softly:

"'Oh, the prairies' air so quiet, an' there's allers lots of room In the golden fields of Kansas, when the Sun Flowers Bloom.'"

A low boom of thunder rolled across the western sky; a twilight darkness fell on the earth, and a long night of storm and stress began for the army of deliverance encamped before Peking.

Outside the city the Boxers massed in numbers. Inside more than a hundred thousand waited the coming of hardly more than one-tenth of their number. No wonder they felt secure behind their centuries-old walls.

Thaine Aydelot was accustomed to sleeping tentless on the ground and to being beaten by rains. He was a sound sleeper and he was very weary. But tonight he could not sleep. The morrow would see world movements that should change all future history; in which movements he was a tiny unit, as every furrow that his father, Asher Aydelot, had run across the face of the prairie had by so much won it from wilderness to fruitfulness.

All night long the rain poured in torrents upon the camp. A terrific cannonade of thunder shook the earth. The lightning tore through the clouds in jagged tongues of flame. Where Thaine lay he could see with every flash the great frowning black walls of Peking looming up only a few miles away. In the lull of the thunder a more dreadful cannonading could be heard, hour after hour. Thaine knew that inside the walls the Boxers were besieging the Compound. And inside that Compound, if he were yet alive, was his old teacher, Pryor Gaines. He wondered if the God of Battles that had led the armies all this long hard way would fail them now when one more blow might bring deliverance to His children. He remembered again the blessing with which his father had sent him forth:

"As thy day so shall thy strength be. The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms."

The memory brought peace, and at length, wrapped round in the blessing of an absolute trust, he fell asleep.

Inside of the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is offered up. A human jungle, untamed and waiting, to whose wilderness the soldier became a light-bearer, albeit he brought the gospel of gunpowder to aid him.

The great walls about Peking enclose an area some fourteen miles in length and twelve miles in width. Within these walls lie several cities, separated from each other by walls of lesser strength, intended, with one exception, in the opening of the twentieth century, not so much for defense as for boundary lines.

The exception is the Imperial City, inside whose sacred precincts it was firmly believed a foreigner might not set foot and not be stricken dead by the gods. This City within a city had defenses the allied armies were yet to come against. It lies on the north, inside the great wall. Just east of it, along the north wall, was the Foreign Legation, whose south and east bounds were lesser structures of brick and earth. Here all the foreigners and many native Christians had been shut in for six long weeks, with the infuriated Boxers hammering daily at their gates, mad for massacre.

Here they had barricaded themselves with all the meager means available. They had fortified every gate with whatever might stop a bullet or check a cannon ball. They filled up the broken places in the walls with piles of earth; they dug deep trenches inside these walls, and inside these trenches they had built up heaps of earthworks. Daily they strengthened the weaker places and watched and prayed. No word from the big world outside seemingly could come to them—a little handful of the Lord's children, forgotten of Him, and locked dungeon deep from human aid. They had sent out a cry for help and had sent up prayers for deliverance. How far that cry had gone they could not know. Frowning walls besieged by enemies lay all around them. They could only look up and lift up helpless hands in prayer to the hot, unpitying August skies above them. Sickness stalked in over the walls. Hunger tore its way through the gates. Death swooped down, and sorrow seeped up, and despair lay in wait. But hope, and trust, and faith, and love failed not.

They ate dogs and horses. They went half naked that they might make sand bags of their clothes for greater defense. They exhausted every means for protection and life, but they forgot not to pray.

On this August night, while unknown to the besieged the Allied Armies encamped only six miles away, the reign of terror reached its height for the little Christian stronghold.

The storm beat pitilessly on the starved and ragged captives. The rain softened the earthworks and the rivers of water in the trenches threatened to undermine the walls. Across these walls the incessant attack of cannon and roar of rifles was beyond anything the six weeks' siege had known, and only the power of Omnipotence could stay the bloody hands. So the long hours of the dreadful night dragged on.

At length came daydawn. The storm had rolled away. A lull in the besieging guns gave the Legation a little rest of mind. Hungry and helpless, it waited the passing of another day. A silence seemed to fill the city and the wiser ones wondered anxiously what it might portend.

Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast. Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on. Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance! They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds' song, of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral chimes, of grandest orchestras—nothing of them all could sound so like to the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles.

With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north. It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of shells and whir of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the ground in a very ecstasy of joy.

"They've run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!"

The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel.

The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impassable defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men did not hesitate. With General Chaffee's troops in the front of the line they fought through fiercely skirmishing forces up to the hoary old city's gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates.

"I want to know what's on the other side before I open up the gates," General Chaffee declared.

So the command was given for a volunteer to scale the wall, to stand up a target for the Chinese rifles! To be blown to pieces by Chinese cannon! Yet the armies must know what awaited them. There must be no debouching into a death-trap for a wholesale massacre.

Thaine Aydelot had cherished one hope since the twilight hour on the battlefield at Yang-Tsun—that when this day should come the American might lead the way through the Peking gates and be first to enter the strange old city. Not merely because he was an American patriot, but because to him the American soldiers with all their sins and follies of youth and military life were yet world missionaries.

Thaine knew his comrades shared his hope, whether for the same high purpose he could not have asked. He had no longer dreams of military glory for himself. His joy was in achievement, no matter by whose hand.

"There's an order for somebody to go up on the wall."

The word was passed along the line. Before it reached Thaine and his comrades a young soldier had leaped forward to obey the order.

"Glory be, America first!" Goodrich said fervently.

"And a Kansan. A Jayhawker!"

Thaine did not know who said it. He saw the soldier, young Calvin Titus, a Kansas boy, leap after the Japanese coolies who ran forward toward the wall with the long bamboo scaling ladders. And for one instant's flash of time the old level prairies came sweeping into view, the winding line of Grass River with the sand dunes beyond; the wheat fields, the windbreaks, the sunflowers beside the trail, and far away the three headlands veiled in the golden haze of an August morning. A Kansas boy the hero of the day—first of all that army to stand on top of that hoary old wall! The prairies had grown another name for the annals of history.

Before him were the little brown coolies holding the ladder, and up its slender swaying height, round by round, went young Titus nimbly as a squirrel up a cottonwood limb.

The Kansas men went wild.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U! oo!" they shouted again and again, ending in the long quavering wail as the University yell must always end.

Up and up went Titus, sixty feet, to the top of the wall. Then as he stood above the strange old Oriental city, rilled now with frenzied fighters; above the poor starving Christians in their Compound—saved as by a miracle; above the twelve thousand soldiers sent hither from the far homelands beyond the seas to rescue human beings from deadly peril. As he stood over all these, a target for a hundred guns, the khaki-clad young Kansan lifted his right hand high above his head and swung out the Stars and Stripes to all the breezes of that August morning.

Then came the belching of cannon, the bursting of huge timbers, the groaning of twisting iron, and through the splintered gates the Allied Armies had entered the city.

Inside the walls the hundred thousand Boxers renewed the strife. The walls and gates of the Foreign Legation were as stubbornly defended by the Chinese fanatics on the outside now as the besieged Christians had defended them against the Chinese on the inside. Entrance was made at last through the sluiceway, or open sewer, draining out under the city walls.

It was a strange looking line of creatures who came crawling, waist-deep in filth, through the sewer's channel. The old Aydelot sense of humor had saved Thaine many a time. And he wondered afterward if he had not seen by chance the ludicrous picture of himself in a huge mirror, if his heart would not have burst with grief when Pryor Gaines came toward him, mute and pallid, with outstretched hands.

The little group of soldiers who had fought and marched together had not had off their clothes for seven days. A stubby two weeks' beard was on each face. Their feet were raw from hard marching. Rain and dust and mud and powder smoke had trimmed their uniforms, and now the baptism by immersion in the Compound sewer had given them the finishing touches. But the gaunt-faced men and women, the pitiful, big-eyed children, whose emaciated forms told the tale of the six weeks' imprisonment, made them forget themselves as these poor rescued Christians hugged and kissed their brave rescuers.

Thaine hadn't kissed any woman except his mother since the evening when he and Leigh Shirley had lingered on the Purple Notches in a sad-sweet moment of separation. It lifted the pressure crushing round his heart when he saw Goodrich, with shining eyes, bending to let a poor little missionary stroke his grimy cheek.

The Boxers retired by degrees before the superior force, entrenching themselves inside the Imperial City. Never in its history, centuries on centuries old, had this Imperial City's sacred precincts been defiled by foreign feet. Here the Boxer felt himself secure. Here the gods of his fathers would permit no foreigner to enter. On these hoary old walls no Christian would dare to stand. On three sides of the Imperial City these walls were invincible. The fourth was equipped with six heavy gates.

In a council of the powers the impossibility of storming these gates was fully made clear. The number of soldiers was carefully estimated—American, Japanese, Russian, German, French, and Italian, Sikh and Sepoy, Bengalese, Scotchman, Welsh, and Royal Englishmen. All had suffered heavily in this campaign. None more grievously than the American.

The decision of the council was overwhelming that the Imperial City could not be taken by this little force outside its battlements. Only General Chaffee protested against giving up the attempt.

"Can your men take those walls?" The query came from the leaders.

"My men can take hell," General Chaffee replied, with less of profanity than of truth in his terms. And the attempt was given over to the Americans.

One of the six gates stood wide open, a death-trap laid by the wily Boxer, believing that the foreign forces would rush through it to be shot down like rats in a hole. Beyond it was a paved court some five hundred yards wide, reaching up to a second wall, equipped likewise with six great gates.

Thaine's company was singled out to go inside the open gate and draw the Boxer fire toward themselves while the American army stormed the closed gates. The little group of men lay flat on the pavement, defending themselves and harassing the enemy. They knew why they had been sent in, but they were seasoned soldiers. Thaine looked down the line of less than a hundred men, McLearn, and Boehringer, Tasker, Goodrich, and Binford, all were in that line. He felt a thrill of soldier pride as he said to himself:

"We are fit. They have chosen us for the sacrifice. We'll prove ourselves." Then he thought of nothing else but duty all that day.

The capture of the first wall opened the way to a second with a paved court beyond it, and beyond that lay a third, and a fourth, and a fifth; wall and court, wall and court, through which, and across which the American army forced its way by heaviest bombarding under heaviest fire, leaving a clean rear for the other armies to follow in. Only the sixth and last wall remained. General Chaffee's men had not failed. The flag of red, white, and blue had led steadily on 'mid a storm of shells and a deluge of bullets.

One more onslaught and the last gates would burst wide open. Eagerly the American soldiers waited the command to finish the task. But it was not given. The leaders of the other armies had counseled together and prevailed against further advance, whether moved by military prudence or governed by jealousy of the ability of General Chaffee and the magnificent record of the American soldiers in the Orient, the privates could not know.

Just as the command to retire was sounded Japanese coolies had run with scaling ladders to the last wall. It was the supreme moment for Thaine Aydelot. He was only a private, but in that instant all the old dominant Cavalier blood of the Thaines, all the old fearless independence of the Huguenot Aydelots, all the calm poise and courage of the Quaker Penningtons throbbed again in his every pulse-beat. He threw aside his soldier obligation and stood up a man, guided alone by the light within him.

"It is a far cry from the green Kansas prairies to the heart of old China," he declared to himself. "Yet I'll go to the heart of that heart now, and I'll show it the Stars and Stripes of a free people, so help me God!"

He turned and sped to the last wall, snatching the flag from a color-bearer as he ran. At the foot of the ladder the men holding it wavered a little. Thaine threw the flag up to a coolie who was already climbing.

"Take it up. If I don't get up, wave it there if you die for it," he cried as he sprang up the ladder behind the color-bearer.

The shots were thick about them as up and up they went until at last Thaine stood beside the indomitable little Japanese who had carried the American flag up the ladder.

Below the Kansas boy lay the holy city of an ancient civilization in all its breadth of ingenuity and narrowness of spirit. Standing there, a target for every gun, waving the Star-Spangled Banner out over that old stronghold, he cried:

"This is the end of the wilderness! Look up and see the token of light and hope and love. Other hands than mine will bear them to you, but I have shown you their symbol. I, Thaine Aydelot, of Kansas, first of all the world, have dared to stand on your most sacred walls with Old Glory in my hand. Wherever its shadow falls there is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In God's good time they will all come to you in peace as they have come to you now in warfare. Mine today has been the soldier service, and mine today the great reward."



CHAPTER XXIV

THE CALL OF THE SUNFLOWER

Sons and daughters of the prairie, Dreaming, dreaming, Of the starry nights that vary, Gleaming, gleaming! You may wander o'er your country where the vales and mountains be, You may dwell in lands far distant, out beyond the surging sea. But ah! just a yellow sunflower, though across the world you roam, Will take you back to Kansas and the sun-kissed fields of home. —Nancy Parker.

Thaine Aydelot sat with Doctor Carey and Pryor Gaines in the latter's home in the Foreign Compound in Peking.

"I have done my work here," Pryor was saying. "I have only one wish—to go back to old Grass River in Kansas and spend my days with Jim Shirley. We two will both live to be old because we are useless; and Leigh will be marrying one of these times, if the Lord ever made a man good enough for her. So Jim and I can chum along down the years together."

"It is the place for you, Pryor," Doctor Carey asserted. "And now that the ranch is making money while Jim sleeps, you two will be happy and busy as bees. Every neighborhood needs a man or two without family ties. You'll be the most useful citizens in that corner of the prairies. And think of eating Jim Shirley's cooking after this."

"And you, Thaine? What now?" Pryor asked as he looked fondly at the young battle-tried soldier.

"I have done my work here," Thaine quoted his words. "I've only one wish—to go back to old Grass River in Kansas to take my place on the prairie and win the soil to its best uses; to do as good a work as my father has done."

Thaine's dark eyes were luminous with hopefulness, and if a line of pathos for a loss in his life that nothing could fill had settled about his firm mouth, it took nothing from the manliness of the strong young face.

"And you, Carey?" Pryor asked.

Doctor Carey did not reply at once. A strange weariness had crept over his countenance, and a far-away look was in his eyes. The man who had forgotten himself in his service for others was coming swiftly toward his reward. But neither of his friends noted the change now. At last he said:

"Years ago I loved a girl as I never could care for any other girl. She would have loved me sooner or later if something hadn't happened. A message from the man she cared for most fell into my hands one day long ago: a withered flower and a little card. I could have kept them back and won her for my wife, but I didn't. I sent the message to her by a servant boy—and she has been happy always in her love."

Doctor Carey turned his face away for the moment. Thaine Aydelot's eyes were so much like Virginia Thaine's to him just then. Presently he went on:

"Sometimes the thing we fail to get helps us to know better how to live and to live happily. You will not be a coward, Thaine, when you come, year by year, to know the greater wilderness inside yourself. You will go back to the prairies where you belong, as you say, and you will do a man's part in the big world that's always needing men."

Thaine recalled the evening hour when he and Leigh were on the Purple Notches and he had declared in the pride of his nineteen years that he wanted to go out into the big world that is always needing men and do a man's part there.

"If the big world needs men anywhere, it is on the old prairies," he declared, and the doctor continued: "I have found my future already. I shall not leave China again. Grass River may miss me as a friend but not as a doctor of medicine. Doctors are too plentiful there. My place is here henceforth, and I'm still young. I came to the Philippines to be with Thaine"—Horace Carey's voice was low, and the same old winning smile was on his face—"because I love the boy and because I wanted to protect him if it should be my fortune to do it. I saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande and helped to pull him out of the hospital at Manila. He doesn't need me now, for he goes to do a big work, and I stay here to do a big work."

"Out of love for me alone?" Thaine asked affectionately, throwing one arm about Horace Carey's shoulder.

"No, not you alone," Carey answered frankly, "but because something in your face always reminds me of a face I loved long ago. Of one for whose sake I have cared for you here. You are going home a brave man. I believe your life will be full of service and of happiness."

The silence that followed was broken by Pryor Gaines saying:

"All this time—such a tragical time—I have forgotten, Thaine, that I have a message for you, a little package that reached here late last May. It was sent to me because the sender thought you were coming to China soon, and I was asked to keep it for you. You didn't come, and mails ceased to leave Peking—and then came the siege, the struggle to keep up the defenses, the sickness, the starvation, the deaths, the constant attacks, the final sight of Old Glory on the outer walls, and your triumphal entry through the sewer. You see why I forgot."

He took a little package from his writing desk and gave it into Thaine Aydelot's hand.

The young soldier tried to open it with steady fingers, for the address was in a handwriting he knew well. Inside a flat little box was a card bearing the words:

To Prince Quippi, Beyond the Purple Notches.

And underneath that lay a withered little yellow sunflower.

* * * * *

Two evenings later as the three men sat together, Horace Carey suddenly gripped Thaine's hand in his, then sank back in his chair with eyes that seemed looking straight into eternal peace; and the same smile that had won men to him seemed winning the angels to welcome him heavenward. In the midst of his busy, useful years his big work was done.

* * * * *

The sunflowers were just beginning to blossom along the old Grass River Trail. The line of timber following every stream was in the full leafage of May. The wheat lay like a yellow-green sea over all the wide prairies. The breeze came singing down the valley, a morning song of gladness.

Leigh Shirley had come up early to the Sunflower Ranch to spend the day and night with Virginia Aydelot, while Asher and her uncle Jim took a two days' business trip to Big Wolf with Darley Champers. Jim had brought Virginia a big bunch of exquisite roses which nobody but Jim Shirley could ever have grown to such perfection.

Virginia went into the house to find the tall cut-glass vase Doctor Carey had sent to her when he started West, while Leigh went to the gate of the side lot to pet a pretty black colt that whinnied to her.

"You beautiful Juno!" she cried, patting the creature's nose. "Mrs. Aydelot says you are as graceful and well-bred as all your grandmothers have been since the time a Juno long ago followed a prairie schooner down the old Grass River Trail to a little sod shack on a treeless claim in the wilderness. This is too fine a morning to go indoors," she added as she came back to the front lawn to the seat under the fragrant white honeysuckle.

She was as sweet as a blossom herself this morning, with her soft brown-gold hair waving back from her face, and her blue eyes full of light.

Somebody had turned from the road and was coming up the walk with springing step. Leigh turned her head to see who it might be, as she reached for a spray of the fragrant honeysuckle, and found Thaine Aydelot standing before her.

With a glad cry, she dropped the blossoms and sprang to her feet.

"Prince Quippi couldn't come nor write, so he sent me. Will I do for an answer, Leighlie? I was coming back to the blessed old prairies, anyhow; to my father and mother and the life of a farmer. I have come to see at last through Asher Aydelot's eyes that wars in any cause are short-lived, and, even with a Christian soldiery, very brutal; that after the wars come the empire-makers, who really conquer, and that the man who patiently wins from the soil its hundredfold of increase may be a king among men. I can see such big things to be done here, but, oh, Leigh, are you sure you want me here?"

Thaine was holding her hands in a gentle grip, looking with love-hungry eyes down into her face.

"I've always been sure I wanted you," Leigh said softly, "and I've always hoped you would come back here to the prairies again. But, Thaine, I'm so proud of you, too, for all the heroic things you have helped to do in the Philippines and in China. I am glad now you did go for a while. You have been a part of a history-making that shall change all the future years."

Thaine put his arm about her and drew her close to him as he said:

"Then we'll go and build a house on the Purple Notches, a purple velvet house with gold knobs, and all that yellow prairie away to the west that was only grass land four years ago we'll turn to wheat fields like Asher Aydelot's here. John Jacobs was holding that ground for somebody like you and me. We'll buy it of his estate. We'll show the fathers what the sons can do."

A thrill of happiness lighted Leigh's face for a moment, then a shadow fell over it as she said:

"Thaine, Darley Champers and I have kept a secret for a year."

"You kept it 'danged' well. What was it?" Thaine asked gaily.

"Jane Aydelot, who died last year, left me all her property," Leigh began.

"Good for Jennie," Thaine broke in, but Leigh hurried on.

"I always knew she meant to do it, and that was one reason why I sent you away. I wouldn't have your money and I felt if you knew you wouldn't ask me for fear I'd think—Oh, money you don't earn or inherit squarely is such a grief," Leigh paused.

"So you wouldn't let me have any hope because of this junk in Ohio that you were afraid you'd get and I'd seem to be wanting if I married you, and you thought I ought to have and you'd seem to be marrying me to get. If I ever have an estate, I'll leave it to foreign missions. I'd like to make trouble for the cuss that got me at the Rio Grande. Money might do it," Thaine declared.

Leigh did not laugh.

"You are right, Thaine. I was so unhappy about it all. For since I first came to Uncle Jim's, I knew I ought not have Miss Jane's love and the farm that you would have had if she knew you."

"You've known this all these years and never told even me. You silent little subsoiler!" Thaine exclaimed.

"It grew in my mind from an almost babyhood impression to a woman's principle," Leigh declared. "I never thought of telling anybody. But there was another thing that kept me firm that day on the Purple Notches. Years ago, when I was a baby girl, I remember dimly seeing two men in an awful fight one night just at dusk down on the railroad track by Clover Creek in Ohio. I thought one of them was my father. Miss Jane would never tell me anything about it, and made me promise never to speak of it. So I grew up sure that my father had committed some dreadful crime, and, Thaine, until I knew better, I couldn't take the risk of disgracing your name, the proud name of Aydelot."

"Oh, Leigh, it is no matter what our forefathers do—they were all a bad lot if we go back far enough. It's what we do that counts. It's what I do as Thaine Aydelot, not as Asher Aydelot's son, that I must stand or fall by. It's how far we win our wilderness, little girl, not the wilderness our fathers won or lost."

Thaine was sitting beside Leigh now, under the perfumy white honeysuckle blossoms.

"But, Thaine, the bans are all lifted now."

Leigh sat with face aglow. "Your grandfather wouldn't let his property go to a child of Virginia Aydelot, so Miss Jane couldn't give it to you. She left it to me—all her property, provided, or hoping, I would—you should—"she hesitated.

"Yes, we should, and we will," Thaine finished the sentence. "Bless her good soul! I've always been rather fond of her, anyhow!"

"And Darley Champers found out that my father was accidentally drowned long ago in Clover Creek. Uncle Jim says he never could swim, and so that burden is lifted. But, Thaine, will you want to go back to Ohio to the Aydelot homestead? I could sell it for a club house to the Cloverdale Country Club, but I waited till you should come, to know what to do."

There was just a little quaver in Leigh's voice.

"Do you want to go back to Ohio?" Thaine inquired. "Unless you do, the country clubbers may have the place. There is no homestead there for me. This is my homestead. I want that open ranch-land beyond the Purple Notches. But, Leigh, if my father as administrator and trustee for John Jacobs' estate can sell me the ground and your inheritance from Jane Aydelot pays for it, what is there left for me to do after all? I can't take favors and give none. I'll run away and enlist with the Regulars first."

A rueful look came over his face now, and behind the words Leigh read a determined will.

"The real thing is left to you," she replied, "the biggest work of all. You must go out and tame the soil. Your father bought his first quarter with money his father had left him by will, but he had no inheritance to buy all the other quarters that make the big Aydelot wheat fields of the Sunflower Ranch. If every acre of the prairie was covered with a layer of eastern capital, borrowed or inherited, it would not make one stalk of wheat grow nor ripen one ear of corn. But you may turn up the soil with your plow and find silver dollars in the furrow. You may herd cattle on the plains, and their dun hides will bring you cloth-of-gold. You may seed the brown fields with alfalfa, and it will take away the fear of protest or over-draft, as the Coburn book says it will. I know, because I've tried and proved it. Oh, Thaine, with all your grand battles in the East which is always our West, Luzon is still a jungle and China isn't yet in the light. You have only prepared the way for the big things that are to follow. I never hear the old Civil War veterans telling of their achievements in a Grand Army meeting without wishing that, after their great story is told, the Grand Army of the Prairies would tell their tale of how the men and women fought out the battles here with no music of drums nor roar of cannon, nor bugle calls, nor shoulder straps, nor comradeship, nor inspiring heroic climaxes, and straight, fierce campaigns to victory. But just loneliness, and discouragements, and long waiting, and big, foolish-seeming dreams of what might be, with only the reality of the unfriendly land to work upon. I'm so glad you want to stay here and to take that open prairie beyond the Purple Notches for our kingdom."

The happiness in Leigh Shirley's eyes took from Thaine's mind the memory of all the hardship and tragedy of his two years on the battlefield. Her pride in his achievements, her joy in his return and her dream of their future together in a work so full of service, filled his soul with rejoicing, as the May morning opened for these two its paradise of Youth and Love.

* * * * *

Asher and Virginia Aydelot had come out on the veranda to look for Leigh. A moment they waited, then Asher said softly:

"He has forgotten us, but he has come back to the life we love."

"And he will come back to us tenfold more ours, because his heart is here," Virginia answered, and the two stole softly indoors.

"See the roses Jim brought; they seem to belong to that beautiful vase," Virginia said as they stood at the door of the dining room. "I think Jim must have meant them for Leigh and Thaine."

"Yes, he brought us sunflowers in an old tin peach-can wrapped with a newspaper, and we had no mahogany dining room set and not so much cut-glass and china and silver in our cupboard, nor quite such a good rug on our hardwood floor," Asher replied.

"But we had each other and the vision to see all these things coming to us," Virginia said as she looked up into her husband's face with love-lighted eyes. "I wonder where Jim is."

"Jim is present." Jim Shirley came in quietly from the side porch. "He prepared your wedding supper for you. He buried your first-born, and now he comes to give you a daughter, He's been first aid to the Aydelots all along the line, as he will hope to continue to be, world without end, and a little more."

* * * * *

The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian, has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power.

And the father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a wilderness to beauty—these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second generation back to the kingdom whose scepter is the hoe.

Not in vain did the scout of half a century ago drive back the savage Indian from the plains; not in vain did Funston and his "Fighting Twentieth" wade the Tulijan and swim the Marilao; not in vain did Chaffee's army burst the gates of Peking, nor Calvin Titus fling out Old Glory above its frowning walls.

Behind the scout came a patient, brave-hearted band of settlers who, against loneliness and distances and drouth and prairie fire and plague and boom, slowly but gloriously won the wilderness. Into the jungles of Luzon will go the saw and spade and spelling book. Upon the Chinese republic has a new light shined.

Not more to him who drives back the frontier than to him who follows after and wins that wilderness with sword re-shaped to a plowshare does the promise to Asher of old stand evermore secure!

"Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms."

THE END



BOOKS BY MARGARET HILL MCCARTER

WINNING THE WILDERNESS

Illustrated by J. N. Marchand

The latest book from Mrs. McCarter's pen is pronounced by critics the best work she has ever done. It is a tale of the soil, of winning the land from wilderness to fruitfulness. The author has written into it a great human story, an epic of the prairies. It is aptly called "The Sunflower Book," for this flower figures in the glowing romance running through its pages—the golden flower that Kansas chose as its emblem because its face is ever turned toward the light.

A MASTER'S DEGREE

Illustrated in color by W. D. Goldbeck

Vivid in its portrayal of fascinating college life, the fine young men and women do more than win victories in athletics and in the class-room—they win out in the battle for character. Vigorous in its practical idealism, this is a story to influence and inspire.

A WALL OF MEN

Illustrated in color by J. N. Marchand

"With God Almighty backing us, we've got to stand up like a wall of men," said one of the Free-soilers, and so they stood, the defenders of liberty and home, on the newly-settled prairie lands—where the tragedy of the Civil War was keenly known. The heroic figure of John Brown appears in the story, and, with all the warring and suffering, young life with its wonderful love moves through the pages of this powerful book.

THE PEACE OF THE SOLOMON VALLEY

Frontispiece by Clara P. Wilson

In a breezy manner the story is told of a New York City man sending his rheumatic son to Kansas for a six months' stay on the ranch of an old Yale chum living in the Solomon Valley. The indignation and expectations of the young man collapse in the face of the facts, and he falls in love with the life of the Kansas farm—and with the farmer's daughter.

THE PRICE OF THE PRAIRIE

Illustrated in color by J. N. Marchand

In this book Mrs. McCarter made her fame secure. It is a great picture of a thrilling time, and a series of events of historic significance. Its pages are redolent of the sweet air and wide landscapes; the pictures come and go of idyllic childhood, of growing love, of Indian danger, of jealousy, of massacre, and of the movement toward the settled life of the plains. It is a poignant and winning record of the price paid for the prairie home.

A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers CHICAGO

THE END