find
some neighbors just over the hill that you say isn't there."

"Neither the hill nor the neighbors, yet, although settlers will be coming
soon. We won't be lonesome very long, I'm sure."

Asher shifted the reins to his other hand and held the little white
fingers close.

"It wasn't anywhere near here. It was away off in the southwest corner
of--nowhere. I was going to say a shorter word, for that's where we were.
I took that card out of an old deck from the man nearest me. The Comanches
had fixed him, so he didn't need it in his game any more. There were only
two of us left, a big half-breed Cheyenne scout and myself. I picked the
sunflower from the only stalk within a hundred miles of there. I guess it
grew so far from everything just for me that day. Weak as I was, I'll
never forget how hopefully it seemed to look at me. The envelope was one
mother had sent me, you remember. I told the Cheyenne how to start it to
you from the fort. He left me there, wounded and alone--'twas all he could
do--while he went for help about a thousand miles away it must have
seemed, even to an Indian. I thought it was my last message to you,
dearie, for I never expected to be found alive; but I was, and when you
wrote back, sending your letter to 'The Sign of the Sunflower,' Oh, little
girl, the old trail blossom was glorified for me forever."

He broke off so suddenly that his wife looked up inquiringly.

"I was thinking of the cool spring and the rocks, and that shady glen, and
the mountains, and the trees, and the well-kept mansion houses, and
servants like Bo Peep to fetch and carry--and here--Virginia, why did you
let me persuade you away from them? Everything was made ready for you
there. The Lord didn't do anything for this country but go off and leave
it to us."

"Yes, to us. Here is the sunflower and the new home in the new West and
Asher Aydelot. And underfoot is the prairie sod that is ours, and overhead
is heaven that kept watch over you for me, and over both of us for this.
And I persuaded you to bring me here because I wanted to be with you
always."

"You can face it all for me?" he asked.

"With you, you mean. Yes, for we'll stop at 'The Sign of the Sunflower' so
long as we both shall live. How beautiful they are, these endless bands of
gold, drawing us on and on across the plains. Asher, you forget that
Virginia is not as it was before the war. But we did keep inherited pride
in the Thaine family, and the will