was just a little quaver in Leigh's voice.

"Do you want to go back to Ohio?" Thaine inquired. "Unless you do, the
country clubbers may have the place. There is no homestead there for me.
This is my homestead. I want that open ranch-land beyond the Purple
Notches. But, Leigh, if my father as administrator and trustee for John
Jacobs' estate can sell me the ground and your inheritance from Jane
Aydelot pays for it, what is there left for me to do after all? I can't
take favors and give none. I'll run away and enlist with the Regulars
first."

A rueful look came over his face now, and behind the words Leigh read a
determined will.

"The real thing is left to you," she replied, "the biggest work of all.
You must go out and tame the soil. Your father bought his first quarter
with money his father had left him by will, but he had no inheritance to
buy all the other quarters that make the big Aydelot wheat fields of the
Sunflower Ranch. If every acre of the prairie was covered with a layer of
eastern capital, borrowed or inherited, it would not make one stalk of
wheat grow nor ripen one ear of corn. But you may turn up the soil with
your plow and find silver dollars in the furrow. You may herd cattle on
the plains, and their dun hides will bring you cloth-of-gold. You may seed
the brown fields with alfalfa, and it will take away the fear of protest
or over-draft, as the Coburn book says it will. I know, because I've tried
and proved it. Oh, Thaine, with all your grand battles in the East which
is always our West, Luzon is still a jungle and China isn't yet in the
light. You have only prepared the way for the big things that are to
follow. I never hear the old Civil War veterans telling of their
achievements in a Grand Army meeting without wishing that, after their
great story is told, the Grand Army of the Prairies would tell their tale
of how the men and women fought out the battles here with no music of
drums nor roar of cannon, nor bugle calls, nor shoulder straps, nor
comradeship, nor inspiring heroic climaxes, and straight, fierce campaigns
to victory. But just loneliness, and discouragements, and long waiting,
and big, foolish-seeming dreams of what might be, with only the reality of
the unfriendly land to work upon. I'm so glad you want to stay here and to
take that open prairie beyond the Purple Notches for our kingdom."

The happiness in Leigh Shirley's eyes took from Thaine's mind the memory
of all the hardship a