Saline
Valley. Somehow I needed his presence that day. It kept me in touch with
my days of greatest schooling. The quiet, forceful friend, who had
taught me how to meet the realities of life like a man, put into my
wedding a memory I shall always treasure. O'mie was still with us then.
When his turn came to greet us he held Marjie's hand a moment while he
slyly showed her a poor little bunch of faded brown blossoms which he
crumpled to dust in his fingers.

"I told you I wouldn't keep them no longer'n till I caught the odor of
them orange blooms. They are the little pink wreath two other fellows
threw away out in the West Draw long ago. The rale evidence of my
good-will to you two is locked up in Judge Baronet's safe."

We laughed, but we did not understand. Not until the Irish boy's will
was read, more than half a year later, when the pink flowers were
blooming again in the West Draw, did we comprehend the measure of his
good-will. For by his legal last wish all his possessions, including the
land, with the big cottonwood and the old stone cabin, became the
property of Marjory Whately and her heirs and assigns forever.

Out there in later years we built our country home. The breezes of
summer are always cool there, and from every wide window we can see the
landscape the old cottonwood still watches over. Above the gateway to
the winding road leading up from the West Draw is inscribed the name we
gave the place,

O'MIE-HEIM.

Sixty years, and a white-haired, young-hearted young man I am who write
these lines. For many seasons I have sat on the Judge's bench. Law has
been my business on the main line, with land dealings on the side, and
love for my fellowmen all along the way. Half a century of my life has
run parallel with the story of Kansas, whose beautiful prairies have
been purchased not only with the coin of the country, but with the coin
of courage and unparalleled endurance. To-day the rippling billows of
yellow wheat, the walls on walls of black-green corn, the stretches of
emerald alfalfa set with its gems of amethyst bloom; orchard and meadow,
grove and grassy upland, where cattle pasture; populous cities and
churches and stately college halls; the whirring factory wheels, the
dust of the mines, the black oil derrick and the huge reservoirs of
natural gas, with the slender steel pathways of the great trains of
traffic binding these together; and above all, the sheltered happy
homes, where little child