id Virginia; "and when she sees you making
a home for some one else, how happy it will make her!"

Virginia was the older of the two, now, the utterer of words of comfort;
and I was the child. The moon rose late, but before we retired it
flooded the grove with light. The wolves howled on the prairie, and the
screech-owls cried pitifully in the grove; but I was happy. I told
Virginia that we must break camp in the morning and move on. I must get
to my land, and begin making that home. She sighed; but she did not
protest. She would always remember this sojourn in the grove, she said;
she had felt so safe! She hardly knew what she would do when we reached
the next settlement; but she must think out some way to get back to
Kentucky. When the time came for her to retire, I carried her to the
wagon and lifted her in--and then went to my own bed to sleep the first
sound sweet sleep I had enjoyed for days. The air had been purified by
the storm.

CHAPTER XI

IN DEFENSE OF THE PROPRIETIES

Virginia and I arrived in Waterloo about two days after we left the
Grove of Destiny, as my granddaughter Gertrude insists on calling the
place at which we camped after we left Independence. We went in a sort
of rather guess-way back to the Ridge Road, very happy, talking to each
other about ourselves all the while, and admiring everything we saw
along the way. The wild sweet-williams were in bloom, now, and scattered
among them were the brilliant orange-colored puccoons; and the grass
even on the knolls was long enough to wave in the wind like a rippling
sea. It was a cool and sunny spell of weather, with fleecy clouds
chasing one another up from the northwest like great ships under full
sail running wing-and-wing before the northwest wind which blew strong
day and night. It was a new sort of weather to me--the typical
high-barometer weather of the prairies after a violent "low." The
driving clouds on the first day were sometimes heavy enough to spill
over a scud of rain (which often caught Virginia like a cold splash from
a hose), and were whisked off to the southeast in a few minutes,
followed by a brilliant burst of sunshine--and all the time the shadows
of the clouds raced over the prairie in big and little bluish patches
speeding forever onward over a groundwork of green and gold dotted with
the white and purple and yellow of the flowers.

We were now on terms of simple trust and confidence. We played. We bet
each other great s