t. It took me two days and a half to haul up a load of
stuff, mostly sunflower stalks, that I gathered down south."

"Aydelot's black mare could do it if anything could," Pryor Gaines
declared, trying to speak cheerfully, yet he was the least able to meet
the hardships of that season.

"Yes, maybe," Shirley commented. "She's a thoroughbred, and they finally
win, you know. But knowing what you do, who of you wants to face Darley
Champers?"

Again a hopeless despair filled the hearts of the little company. Todd
Stewart clinched his hands together. The husband of the sick woman set his
jaws like iron. Pryor Gaines turned his face away and offered no further
word. Asher Aydelot sat looking out across the prairie, touched to silvery
beauty by the pitying moonlight, and Jim Shirley bowed his head and said
nothing.

"I will go to Wykerton," Virginia Aydelot's soft voice broke the silence.
"I'll take Juno and go tomorrow morning. If Darley Champers refuses me, he
would do the same to you."

"Oh, Mrs. Aydelot, will you go? Can you try it? Do you think you could do
it?" The questions came from the eager settlers.

"We'll try it, Juno and I," Virginia replied.

"Thoroughbreds, both of 'em," Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and
Pryor Gaines' face expressed the things he could not say.

"I believe that is the best thing to do," Asher Aydelot declared.

Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.

As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came
surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had
ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its
beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence
had slipped away from the sunset.

"'The heavens declare the glory of God,'" Virginia said to herself. "Has
He forgotten the earth which is His also?"

She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher,
standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her.

"Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept
farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike
road? He gave it all up for me--all his inheritance for me and this."

She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the
solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.

"I'll tell him tonight I'm ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and
Asher can live wher