joy in the cultured appointments
of society. She had a genius for music, trained in the best schools of the
East. And sometimes in the lonely days, she marked her only table with a
bit of charcoal to the likeness of a keyboard. Then she set her music
against her clean dishpan and dumbly fingered the melodies she had loved,
hoping her hands might not lose all their cunning in these years of
home-making on the plains.

The spring of the memorable year of 1874 opened auspiciously. The peach
trees on the Aydelot and Shirley claims bloomed for the first time; more
sod had been turned for wheat and corn; gardens and truck patches were
planted; cattle were grazing beyond the sand dunes across the river, while
the young cottonwood and catalpa groves, less than three feet high it is
true, began to make great splotches of darker green on the prairie,
promising cool forest shade in coming years. Mail went west on the main
trail three times a week. The world was coming nearer to the Grass River
settlement which, in spite of his doleful view once, Darley Champers was
helping to fill up to the profit of the real estate business.

Carey's Crossing, having given up all hope of becoming a county seat, had
faded from the face of the earth. The new county seat of Wolf County was
confidently expected to be pitched at Wykerton, up in the Big Wolf Creek
settlement, where one Hans Wyker, former saloon-keeper of Carey's
Crossing, was building up a brewery for the downfall of the community. Dr.
Carey was taking an extended medical course in the East, whither Bo Peep
had followed him. Darley Champers was hovering like a hawk between
Wykerton and the Grass River settlement. Todd Stewart had taken a claim,
while John Jacobs, temporarily in the East, was busy planting the seeds
for a new town which no Wyker brewery should despoil.

All lovely was this springtime of 1874. Midsummer had another story to
tell. A story of a wrathful sun in a rainless sky above a parched land,
swept for days together by the searing south winds. In all the prairie
there was no spot of vivid green, no oasis in the desert of tawny grasses
and stunted brown cornstalks, and bare, hot stubble wherefrom even the
poor crop of straw had been chaffless and mean.

On a Sabbath morning in late July, the little Grass River schoolhouse was
crowded, for Sabbath school was the event of the week. It did not take a
multitude to crowd the sod-built temple of learning. Even with the inf