there is no bend any more!" she cried as she halted her car
and gazed in amazement and horror at the river valley where a broad,
full stream poured down a new-cut channel straight to the south.

"Joe's home isn't gone at all! Yonder it stands, safe and high above the
flood-line. Oh, where did the river take Joe?" She twisted her hands in
her old quick, nervous way, and stiffened every muscle as if to keep off
a dead weight that was crushing down upon her.

"He said if I wanted him he would be down beyond the blowout. I'm going
to look for him there. I don't know where else to go, and I want him."

The white, determined face and firm lips bespoke Jim Swaim's own child
now. And if the speed of her car was increased, no one would ever know
that the thought of reaching her goal ahead of any possible Thelma might
be the impetus that gave the increase.

"Yonder are the three cotton woods. From there I can see the oak-grove
and all of my rare old acres of sand. What beautiful wheat everywhere!
The storm seems to have hit the other side of the river as it runs now,
and left all this fine crop to Joe. But what for, if it took him?"

Her quick imagination pictured possibilities too dreadful for words.

<tb>

Down in the oak-grove, Joe Thomson stood leaning against a low bough,
staring out at the river valley, with the shimmering glow of the
twilight sky above it. At the soft whirring sound of an automobile he
turned, to see a gray runabout coasting down the long slope from the
three cottonwoods.

"Jerry!" The glad cry broke from his lips involuntarily.

Jerry did not speak. After the first instant of assurance that Joe was
alive, her eyes were not on the young ranchman, but on the landscape
beyond him. There, billow on billow of waving young wheat breaking
against the oak-wood outpost swept in from far away, where once she had
looked out on nothing but burning, restless sand, spiked here and there
by a struggling green shrub.

"What has done all this?" she cried, at last.

"I'm partly 'what,'" Joe Thomson replied. The shadows were on his face
again, and his loss, after that moment of glad surprise, seemed to be
doubly heavy.

"But how? I don't understand. I'm dreaming. You really are here, and not
dead, are you?"

"No, you are not dreaming. I only wish you were," Joe responded,
gloomily. "But no matter. Yes, I'm here. 'Part of me lived, but most of
me died,'" he muttered Kipling's line half audibly. "I subleased yo