eless open, while the cultivated fields were a mass of yellow
clods about the starveling crops.

Asher did not heed the interruption.

"You declare that I'll leave here as soon as I can get away, and that I'm
brutal to use my influence to keep the settlers here; that I am working a
trick _you_ have worked out already for me, to get the land myself because
it is valuable; you, in your humane love for your fellowmen, you threaten
me with all unknown calamities if I refuse your demand. And then you ask
me what I have to say, what I am going to do, and, with fine gestures,
what I see?"

"Well?" Champers queried urgently.

The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did
not hasten his words for all the bluster.

"I say I am not using my influence to keep any man here or push him out of
here. I speak only for the family at the Sunflower Inn. I know 'danged
well' I am not going to leave the Grass River country this fall. Further,
I know your hand before you play it, and I know that if you can play it
against Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and the rest of
them, I haven't taken their measure right. I know, again, that I am not
afraid of you, nor can any threat you make have an influence on my action.
And, lastly, as to what I see."

Asher turned toward the west where the hot air quivered between the iron
earth and a sky of brass.

"I see a land fair as the garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad
meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and
rivers, a land of comfortable homes and schools and churches--and no
saloons nor breweries."

"I see a danged fool," Darley Champers cried, springing up.

"Come down here in twenty-five years and make a hunt for me, then," Asher
said with a smile, but Champers had already plunged inside the
schoolhouse.

The council following was a brief one. Three or four Grass River settlers
agreed to give up the equity on their claims of one hundred and sixty
acres for enough money to transport themselves and their families to their
former homes east of the Mississippi River. This decision left only one
child of all the little ones there, Todd Stewart, a stubby little fellow,
as much of a Scotchman as his fair-haired father, who wound one arm about
his father's neck, and whispered:

"They can't budge us, can they, dad?"

When the matter was concluded, Darley Champers rose to his feet.

"I want to say one thing," he be