n honest penny by coming over and working for me for a while?"

He had been astonished and startled at the word that Virginia, after
escaping from him, had found friends, and tried to pass the matter off
as something of which he knew; but now he was quite his smiling,
confidential self again, talking as if his offering me work was a favor
he was begging in a warm and friendly sort of manner. I explained that
I myself was getting my farm in condition to live upon, but might be
glad to come to him later; and we drove on--I all the time sweating like
a butcher under the strain of this getting so close to my great
secret--and Virginia's.

Would it not all have to come out finally? What would Gowdy do to get
Virginia back? Would he try at all? Did he have any legal right to her
control and custody? I trusted completely in Grandma Thorndyke's
protection of her--an army with banners would not have given me more
confidence; for I could not imagine any one making her do anything she
thought wrong, and ten armies with all the banners in the world could
not have forced her to allow anything improper--and she had said that
she and the elder were going to take care of the poor friendless
girl--yet, I looked back at the Gowdy buggy flying on toward the
village, in two minds as to whether or not I ought to go back and
do--something. If I could have seen what that something might have been,
I should probably have gone back; but I could not think just where I
came into the play here.

So I went on-toward the goal of all my ambitions, my square mile of Iowa
land, steered by Henderson L. Burns, who, between shooting prairie
chickens, upland plover and sickle-billed curlew, guided me toward my
goal by pointing out lone boulders, and the mounds in front of the dens
of prairie wolves and badgers. We went on for six miles, and finally
came to a place where the land slopes down in what is a pretty steep
hill for Iowa, to a level bottom more than a mile across, at the farther
side of which the land again rises to the general level of the country
in another slope, matching the one on the brow of which we halted. The
general course of the two hills is easterly and westerly, and we stood
on the southern side of the broad flat valley.

3

As I write, I can look out over it. The drainage of the flat now runs
off through a great open ditch which I combined with my neighbors to
have dredged through by a floating dredge in 1897. The barge set