'a' been free, either, if Mr. Noland hadn't 'a' left
you th' money," Mrs. Farnshaw replied.

Elizabeth dropped into a retrospective mood for a moment before she
answered, and then said slowly:

"I know that. God in Heaven, how well I know it! And do you know I think
about it every day--what could be done for the poor women on these hot
Kansas prairies if there were some way to see that every girl that loves a
man enough to marry him could have money enough to keep her if she
couldn't live under the work and children he crowds on her. I'm free,
because I have money enough all my own to live on. That's the weight of a
dollar. Don't forget that, you poor ma, who have never had a dollar except
what has been doled out to you by the man you married. The weight of a
dollar," Elizabeth added meditatively, "that's what it is!"

Mrs. Farnshaw, who had bought the groceries for her little family with the
butter and eggs, and whose sugar had sometimes been short because there
was a supply of Horse Shoe Plug to provide also, had no answer ready.

CHAPTER XXVI

"WAS--WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?"

Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw
the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later,
when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it
for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas
Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had
felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way
in which she had won her way back into the country society about them,
came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had
prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would
become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer.
What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become
noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the
first Sunday after John's departure, and Hepsie's explanation of it, had
worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of
its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence
which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community
should wield. She took a class in the little Sunday school at the
schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as
because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabet