trouble was a blow. The sensitive child already carried a
load of financial worry which was tugging at every pleasure her young life
craved.

"Won't we have any corn at all?" she cried in dismay.

"I don't know," Luther answered dubiously. "It'll be starvin' times about
here. You better get your folks t' sell out and go East too," he said,
without looking up.

The child's fear of financial disaster was eased by the prospect of "goin'
East." The "East" was the fairyland of her dreams, the childhood's home of
her father, who was a good story-teller when he was not irritated, the
Mecca and Medina of all the pilgrimages of all their little world. To go
East was to be a travelled person, to attain distinction, just the next
best thing in fact to being made President of the United States. To go
East was to live near the timber, where one could wander for hours, days,
ages, in the cool freshness of its shady paths. The sunburned child, with
her jug hanging by a strap from the saddle horn, had a swift, rapturous
vision of alluring, mossy banks, canopied by rustling leaves, before she
was called back to the stern hills of her native Kansas and the sterner
necessity of forcing a hundred head of maddened cattle to keep within the
confines of an illy defined road.

By the time they had ridden ahead and crowded the cattle down to the right
of way again, the child's natural good sense and business instincts had
combined to temporarily shatter the dream.

"Nobody 'd buy us out if there ain't nothing to feed the cattle," she
said, watching the boy's face eagerly in the hope that he would reassure
her.

When he did not speak, she added, with discouraged conviction, "Pa
wouldn't sell out anyhow; ma's been trying to get him to for a year."

"He'll have to. You won't be able t' stay if there's nothin' t' feed," the
lad said with emphasis, and then added with a giggle, "I bet th' Cranes is
mad for bein' in such a hurry t' get in. They paid pap th' money last
night, an' made 'im promise t' give possession 'fore t'morrow night. Three
hundred dollars! Th' old woman took it out of 'er stockin'."

"Three hundred dollars!" Lizzie Farnshaw repeated, whirling her horse
about suddenly at the mention of a sum of money which ran into hundreds.
She looked at the boy enviously. She was but fourteen, and did not realize
that more than three hundred acres of fertile land had been exchanged for
the sum. Her spirits rose as they turned to follow the