sweet lips would be a sum of joy, earthly,
all-satisfying, precious. The man in him trembled all over at the daring
thought. He might revel in such dreams, and surrender to them, since she
would never know, but the divinity he sensed there in the presence of
those stars did not dwell on a woman's lips. Kisses were for the
present, the all too fleeting present; and he had to concern himself
with what he might do for one girl's future. It was exquisitely sad and
sweet to put it that way, though Kurt knew that if he had never seen
Lenore Anderson he would have gone to war just the same. He was not
making an abstract sacrifice.

The wheat-fields rolling before him, every clod of which had been
pressed by his bare feet as a boy; the father whose changeless blood had
sickened at the son of his loins; the life of hope, freedom, of action,
of achievement, of wonderful possibility--these seemed lost to Kurt
Dorn, a necessary renunciation when he yielded to the call of war.

But no loss, no sting of bullet or bayonet, no torturing victory of
approaching death, could balance in the scale against the thought of a
picture of one American girl--blue-eyed, red-lipped, golden-haired--as
she stepped somewhere in the future, down a summer lane or through a
blossoming orchard, on soil that was free.

CHAPTER IV

Toward the end of July eastern Washington sweltered under the most
torrid spell of heat on record. It was a dry, high country, noted for an
equable climate, with cool summers and mild winters. And this
unprecedented wave would have been unbearable had not the atmosphere
been free from humidity.

The haze of heat seemed like a pall of thin smoke from distant forest
fires. The sun rose, a great, pale-red ball, hot at sunrise, and it
soared blazing-white at noon, to burn slowly westward through a
cloudless, coppery sky, at last to set sullen and crimson over the
ranges.

Spokane, being the only center of iron, steel, brick, and masonry in
this area, resembled a city of furnaces. Business was slack. The asphalt
of the streets left clean imprints of a pedestrian's feet; bits of
newspaper stuck fast to the hot tar. Down by the gorge, where the great
green river made its magnificent plunges over the falls, people
congregated, tarried, and were loath to leave, for here the blowing mist
and the air set into motion by the falling water created a temperature
that was relief.

Citizens talked of the protracted hot spell, of th