for the ranch," Leigh declared calmly. "I
bought of Darley Champers for sixteen hundred dollars. I paid two hundred
down just now. I've been saving it two years; since I left the high school
at Careyville. Butter and eggs and chickens and some other things." She
hesitated, and a dainty pink tint swept her cheek.

Why should a girl be so deliciously fair with the bloom of summer on her
cheeks and with little ringlets curling in baby-gold hair about her
temples and at her neck, and with such red lips sweet to kiss, and then
put about herself a faint invisible something that should make the young
man beside her blush that he would even think of being so rude as to try
to kiss her.

"And you paid how much?" Thaine asked gravely.

"Two hundred dollars. I want to borrow fourteen hundred more and get it
clear away from Darley Champers. I'm sure with a ranch again, Uncle Jim
will be able to win out," Leigh insisted.

"What's on it now?" Thaine asked.

"Just weeds and a million sunflowers. Enough to send Prince Quippi such a
message he'd have to write back a real love letter to me," Leigh replied.

"Leighlie, you can't do it. You might pay interest maybe, year in and year
out, the gnawing, wearing interest. That's all you'd do even with your
hens and butter. Don't undertake the burden."

"I've already done it," Leigh declared.

"Throw it up. You can't make it," Thaine urged.

"I know I can," Leigh maintained stoutly.

"You can't."

"I can."

"How?" Thaine queried hopelessly.

"If I can get the loan--"

"Which you can't," Thaine broke in. "Any man on Grass River will tell you
the same, if you don't want to believe the word of a nineteen-year-old
boy."

"Thaine, I must do something. Even our home is mortgaged. Everything is
slipping out from under us. You don't know what that means."

"My father and mother knew it over and over." Thaine's face was full of
sympathy.

"And they won out. I'm not so foolish after all. When they came out here,
they took the prairies as Nature had left them, grass-covered and waiting.
I'm taking them as the boom left them, weed-covered and waiting. I'll earn
the interest myself and make the land pay the principal and I know exactly
how it will do it, too."

"Tell me how," Thaine demanded.

"It's no dream. I got the idea out of a Coburn book last winter," Leigh
replied.

"You mean the State Agricultural Report of Secretary Coburn? Funny place
to hunt for inspiration; queer gosp