ght and
for leaving home today.

"No, it's his mother he's ceased to love," Todd said, coming inside. "He
said he'd quit the old home and was moving his goods up to Wolf Creek for
keeps. And with that fat tow-headed Gimpke girl sitting on the frisky bay
colt as unconcerned as a bump on a log, it was the funniest sight I ever
saw."

Jo tossed her head contemptuously.

"Say, Curly Locks, Curly Locks, you ought to always sit on a cushion and
sew a fine seam and wear a dress to breakfast with those little pink
du-dads scattered over it."

"Not if I was a farmer's wife," Jo responded quickly.

"Oh, Jo, do you really want to be a city girl?" Todd's face was frankly
sorrowful. "Could you never be satisfied on a farm?"

"I don't believe I ever could," Jo said prettily.

"Thaine's a farmer all right, Jo."

"He isn't going to be one always," Jo broke in quickly. "He's going to the
Kansas University and there's no telling after that."

"No, he's just going to Wykerton, that's all. Nay, he have went. Him and
him fraulein. And say, there's another pretty fraulein went up the trail
just ahead of the Aydelot horse party. A sweetheart of a girl whom Thaine
Aydelot took home after all last night."

"I don't care where Thaine goes," Jo cried.

"And you don't care for a farmer anyhow," Todd said suavely.

"Oh, that depends on how helpful he is," Jo responded tactfully.

Todd sprang up and began to fling the chairs about with extravagant energy
in his pretense of being useful.

"Let's help Mrs. Aydelot as swift as possible. It's hot as the dickens
this morning, and the prognostics are for a cyclone before twelve hours.
It's nearly eleven of 'em now. I'll take you home when we are through.
Thaine isn't the whole of Grass River and the adjacent creeks and
tributaries and all that in them is."

CHAPTER XV

THE COBURN BOOK

And I see, from my higher level,
It is not the path but the pace
That wearies the back, and dims the eye,
And writes the lines on the face.
--Margaret E. Sangster.

Meanwhile the May sunshine beat hot upon the green prairie, and the
promised storm gathered itself together behind the horizon where the three
headlands were lost in an ash-colored blur. Wykerton, shut in by the
broken country about Big Wolf Creek, was more uncomfortable than the open
prairie. And especially was it uncomfortable in