nged with red-blooded health. There was something resolute and
patient in the clear gray eyes, as if the mother's own far vision had
crept into them. But the ready smile that had made the Cloverdale
community love the boy broke as quickly now on the man's face, giving
promise that his saving sense of humor and his good nature would be
factors to reckon with in every combat.

Asher had staid in the ranks till the end of the war, had been wounded,
captured, and imprisoned; had fought through a hospital fever and narrowly
escaped death in the front of many battle lines. But he did not ask for a
furlough, nor account his duty done till the war was ended. Just before
that time, when he was sick in a Southern prison, a rebel girl had walked
into his life to stay forever. With his chum, Jim Shirley, he had chafed
through two years in a little eastern college, the while bigger things
seemed calling him to action. At the end of the second year, he broke
away, and joining the regular army, began the hazardous life of a Plains
scout.

Two years of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and
hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned
arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave
comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly
and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies,
among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst,
monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and
sometimes, between sunrises of superb grandeur, and sunsets of sublime
glory, over a land of exquisite virgin loveliness--it is small wonder that
the ruddy cheeks were bronze as an Indian's, that the roundness of boyhood
had given place to the muscular strength of manhood, that the gray eyes
should hold something of patience and endurance and of a vision larger
than the Cloverdale neighborhood might understand.

When Asher had asked, "What do you call my life work, Father?" something
impenetrable was in his direct gaze.

Francis Aydelot deliberated before replying. Then the decisive tone and
firm set of the mouth told what resistance to his will might cost.

"It may not seem quite homelike at first, but you will soon find a wife
and that always settles a man. I can trust you to pick the best there is
here. As to your work, it must be something fit for a gentleman, and
that's not grubbing in the ground. Of course, th