to sing.

"I'm no preacher," he said, holding the song book open a moment, "but I do
believe the Lord loves the fellow who can laugh at his own hard luck. We
weren't so green as Darley Champers tried to have us believe, because the
hoppers didn't bite at us when they took every other green and growing
thing, and we have life enough in us to keep on growing. Furthermore, we
aren't the only people that have been pest-ridden. It's even worse up on
Big Wolf Creek, where Wyker's short on corn to feed his brewery this fall.
I'm going to ask everyone who is still glad he's in the Grass River
settlement in Kansas to stand up and sing just like he meant it. It's the
old Portuguese hymn. Asher and I learned it back on Clover Creek in Ohio.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith--in His excellent word!"

Every man and woman rose at once.

"The 'ayes' have it," Jim declared.

Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate
drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no
doubt, where many worshipers were met together. The same song, sung in
country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber
camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant
heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined
arches of the Old World cathedrals.

But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver,
truer worship from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day
in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody
down the wide spaces of the Grass River Valley.

CHAPTER VII

THE LAST BRIDGE BURNED

...Scores of better men had died.
I could reach the township living, but--He knew what terrors tore me--
But I didn't! But I didn't! I went down the other side.
--The Explorer.

Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the
singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in
that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough
to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they
might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs
left by the grasshoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in
the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to pla