to make a career in either army, he would have
been a general before the war was over.

That afternoon, J.P. Roebuck, who had seen my smoke, came over to
welcome me home and to talk politics with me. We must have a township
for ourselves, he said. Now look at the situation in the school. We had
a big school in the Vandemark schoolhouse, thirteen scholars being
enrolled. We had a good teacher, too, Virginia Royall. But there wasn't
enough fuel to last two days, and those Monterey Centre folks were dead
on their feet and nobody seemed to care if the school closed down. He
went on with his argument for a separate township organization; I all
the time thinking with my mind in a whirl that Virginia was near, and I
could see her next day. When he said that we would have to get the vote
of Doc Bliven, who was a member of the Board of Supervisors, I began to
take notice.

"Bliven always seemed to like you," said Roebuck. "We all kind of wish
you'd see what you can do for us with him."

"I think I can get his vote," I said, after thinking it over for a
while--and as I thought of it, the Dubuque ferry in 1855, the arrest of
Bliven in the queue of people waiting at the post-office, my smuggled
passenger, and the uplift I felt as the Iowa prairie opened to my view
as we drew out of the ravines to the top of the hills--all this rolled
over my memory. Roebuck looked at me like a person facing a medium in
a trance.

"Yes," I said, "I believe I can get his vote. I'll try."

CHAPTER XX

JUST AS GRANDMA THORNDYKE EXPECTED

I was surprised next morning to note the change which had taken place in
the weather. It had been cold and raw when I was crossing the prairies
to my farm, with the wind in the southeast, and filled with a bitter
chill In the night the wind had gone down, and it was as still as death
in the morning. For the first time in my life, and it has happened but
twice since, I heard the whistles of the engines on the railroad twelve
miles away to the north. There was a little beard of hoar frost along
the side of every spear of grass and weed; which, as the sun rose
higher, dropped off and lay under every twig and bent, in a little heap
if it stood up straight, or in a windrow if it slanted; for so still was
the air that the frost went straight down, and lay as it fell. I could
hear the bawling of the cattle in every barnyard for miles around, and
the crowing of roosters as the fowls strutted about in the warm sun.