old-fashioned sweet pinks upon
them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face
hopefully to the West.

CHAPTER II

THE SIGN OF THE SUNFLOWER

Little they knew what wealth untold
Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled:
Who would have dared, with brush or pen,
As this land is now, to paint it then?
--Allerton.

The trail had left the woodland far to the eastward, and wound its way
over broad prairie billows, past bluffy-banked streams, along crests of
low watersheds, until at last it slid down into an open endlessness of the
Lord's earth--just a vasty bigness of landstuff seemingly left over when
geography-making was done. It was untamed stuff, too, whereon one man's
marking was like to the track of foam in the wake of one ship in
mid-ocean. Upon its face lay the trail, broad and barren of growth as the
dusty old National pike road making its way across uplands and valleys of
Ohio. But this was the only likeness. The pike was a gravel-built,
upgraded highway, bordered by little rail-fenced fields and deep forests
hiding malarial marshes in the lower places.

This trail, flat along the ungraded ground, tended in the direction of
least resistance, generally toward the southwest. It was bounded by
absence of landmarks, boulder or tree or cliff. Along either side of it
was a fringe of spindling sunflower stalks, with their blooms of gold
marking two gleaming threads across the plains far toward the misty
nothingness of the western horizon.

The mid-September day had been intensely hot, but the light air was
beginning to flow a bit refreshingly out of the sky. A gray cloud-wave,
creeping tide-like up from the southwest, was tempering the afternoon
glare. In all the landscape the only object to hold the eye was a prairie
schooner drawn by a team of hard-mouthed little Indian ponies, and
followed by a free-limbed black mare of the Kentucky blue blood.

Asher Aydelot sat on the wagon seat holding the reins. Beside him was his
wife, a young, girlish-looking woman with large dark eyes, abundant dark
hair, a straight, aristocratic nose, and well-formed mouth and chin.

The two, coming in from the East on the evening before, had reached the
end of the stage line, where Asher's team and wagon was waiting for them.

The outfit moved slowly. It had left Carey's Crossing at early dawn and
h