"Oh, Mr. Jacobs," was all Virginia could say, and, womanlike, the tears
filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

"Tell the men to send a committee up here with their needs listed," Jacobs
said hastily, "or better, I'll go out there myself the day after tomorrow.
I want to see what kind of a claim Carey has preempted. Good-by, now,
good-by."

He hurried Virginia to her horse and watched her ride away.

Down at the ford of Wolf Creek the willow brush fringed the main trail
thinly for a little distance and half hid the creek trail, winding up a
long canyon-like hollow, until a low place in the bank and a steep climb
brought it up to the open prairie. It was the same trail that Dr. Carey
had spoken of as belonging to an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf,
the trail he had wanted to avoid on the day he had heard Virginia singing
when she was lost on the prairie one cold day.

Virginia paused in this semblance of shade to let Juno drink. She pushed
back her sunbonnet and sat waiting. Her brown face grew radiant as she
thought of the good news she was bearing to the waiting home-makers of the
Grass River Valley. A song came to her lips, and as she sang a soft little
measure she remembered how somewhere down a tributary to this very creek
she had sung for help in pleading tones one cold hopeless day three years
before. So intent was she on the triumph of the hour she did not even look
up the willow-shadowed creek trail.

Dr. Horace Carey, coming in from a distant claim, had dropped into this
trail for the bits of shade here and there and was letting his pony take
its way leisurely along the side of the creek bed. There were only a few
shallow pools now where the fall rains would soon put a running stream,
and as the doctor's way lay along the moist places the pony's feet fell
noiselessly on the soft ground. As he rounded a bend in the stream he
caught sight of Virginia, her face outlined against the background of
willow sprays, making a picture worth a journey to see, it was such a
hopeful, happy face at that moment. Dr. Carey involuntarily checked his
pony at the sight. His own countenance was too pale for a Kansas
plainsman, and he sat so still that the low strain of Virginia's song
reached his ears.

Presently Juno lifted her head and Virginia rode away out on the Sunflower
Trail, bordered now only by dead pest-ridden stalks. Suddenly lifting her
eyes she saw far across a stretch of burned prairie a landscape o