,"
Champers declared as he greeted the young gardener.

"Yes, Uncle Jim is never so happy as when he is puttering about the lawn
and garden," Leigh answered.

"How's your alfalfa doin'?" Champers asked as he turned toward the level
stretch of rich green alfalfa fields. "Danged money-maker for you," he
added jovially.

"We'll clear the place with the first cutting this year. It's just the
thing for Uncle Jim," Leigh asserted.

"Yep, Jim's in clover--alfalfa, ruther. You had a good business head when
you run your bluff some years ago, an' you wan't only nineteen then. You
walked into my place an' jest bought that land on sheer bluff." Champers
laughed uproariously, but he grew sober in the next minute.

"Miss Shirley," he said gravely, "I ain't got much style nor sentiment in
my makin's, but I've honestly tried to be humane by widders an' orphans.
I've done men to keep 'em from doin' me, or jest 'cause they was danged
easy, but I never wronged no woman, not even my wife, who divorced me
years ago back East 'cause I wouldn't turn my old mother out o' doors, but
kep' her and provided for her long as she lived."

Nobody in Kansas had ever heard Darley Champers mention his home relations
before. Leigh looked at him gravely, and the sympathy in her deep blue
eyes was grateful to the uncultured man before her.

"Miss Shirley, I ain't wantin' to meddle none, but I come down here to ask
you if you know anything about your father?"

Leigh gave a start and stared at her questioner, but her woman's instinct
told her that only kindly purpose lay back of his question.

He had sat down on the edge of the porch and Leigh stood leaning against
the trellis, clutching the narrow slats, as she looked at him.

"I think he is dead," she answered slowly. "Uncle Jim says he must be. He
was a bad man, made bad not by blood but by selfishness. The Shirleys are
a fine family."

"Excuse me for sayin' it, Miss, but you took every good trait of that
family, an' Nature jest shied every bad trait as far from you as it took
the sins of our old savage Anglo-Saxon ancestors off of our heads; them
that used to kill an' eat their neighborin' tribes, like the Filipinos,
they was. Don't never forget that you're a Shirley an' not a Tank. Your
grandma's name was Tank, I've been told."

Leigh made no response, but something in her face and in the poise of her
figure bespoke the truth of Darley Champers' words.

"I jest come down to tell you," he c