pose in detaining you and I am in great
luck to have found you," Jerry replied.

"Thank you. The luck will be mine if I can serve you."

The bronze young farmer's gallantry was as gracious as ever the
well-groomed Philadelphia artist's had been.

"Kansas seems determined to get rid of me, if hard knocks mean anything.
I've had nothing but bumps and knotty problems since I landed on these
sand-shifting prairies. It makes me mad and I'm not going to be run off
by it." Jerry's eyes were darkly defiant and her lifted hand seemed
strong to strike for herself.

"You have the real pioneer spirit," Joe declared. "It was that very
determination not to be gotten rid of by a sturdy bunch of forefathers
and mothers that has subdued a state, sometimes boisterous and
belligerent, and sometimes snarling and catty, and made it willing to
eat out of their hands."

"Oh, it's not all subdued yet. It never will be." Jerry pointed down the
trail toward the far distance where her twelve hundred blowout-cursed
acres lay.

Joe Thomson's mouth was set with a bulldog squareness. "Are we less able
than our forefathers?" he asked.

"As to sand--yes," Jerry replied, "but to myself, as a first
consideration, I'm dreadfully in trouble."

"Again?"

"Oh, always--in Kansas," Jerry declared. "First my whole inheritance is
smothered in plain sand--and dies--hard but quickly. Then I fight out a
battle for existence and win a schoolmarm's crown of--"

"Of service," Joe suggested, seriously.

"I hope so. I really do," Jerry assured him. "Next I lease my--dukedom
for a small but vital sum of money on which to exist till--till--"

"Yes, till wheat harvest, figuratively speaking," Joe declared.

"And this morning my purse is empty, robbed of every cent, and my
pearl-handled knife and a button-hook."

Joe had left his wagon and was standing beside Jerry's car, with one
foot on the running-board.

"Stolen! Why, why, where's York?" he asked, in amazement.

"I don't know. I don't think he took it," Jerry replied.

"Oh, but I mean what's he doing about it?" Joe questioned, anxiously.

"Nothing. He doesn't know it. I came to find you first, to get you to
help me."

"Me!" Joe could think of nothing more to say.

"You won't scold, and I'm afraid York would. I don't want to be
scolded," Jerry declared. "He would wonder why I hadn't put it in the
bank. And, besides, there have some queer things been happening in New
Eden--I can't explain them, f