k and coffee. We have been friends
ever since. How long have you known him?"

"I am going to war when I get big, before I ever go to the purple notches.
I know I am."

Thaine had been listening intently and now he broke in with face aglow and
eyes full of eagerness.

"God forbid!" Carey said. "The lure of the drum beat might be hard for
older men to resist even now."

"Your hand will fit a plow handle better than a gun-stock, Thaine," his
father assured him, looking down at the boy's square, sun-browned hand
with a dimple in each knuckle.

Thaine shut his lips tightly and said no more. But his father, who knew
the heart of a boy, wondered what thoughts might lie back of that
silence.

"I have known Jim all my life," Asher Aydelot took up the conversation
where Thaine had interrupted it. "That is why I have wondered at the
tenacity of his holding on out here. A man of his temperament is prone to
let go quickly. Besides, Jim is far from being a strong man physically."

"When he was down with pneumonia in the early seventies he was ready to
give up. Didn't want to get well and was bound not to do it," Dr. Carey
said, "but somehow a letter I had brought him seemed to change him with
one reading. 'I will do anything to get back to strength and work,' he
declared, and he has worked ever since like a man who knew his business,
even if his business judgment is sometimes faulty."

They rode awhile in silence, drinking in the delicious air of early
autumn. Presently Dr. Carey said:

"Aydelot, I am taking a letter down to Jim this morning. It is in the same
handwriting as the one I took when he had the pneumonia so severely. I
learned a little something of Jim's affairs through friends when I was
East studying some years ago."

He paused for a moment. Then, as if to change the subject, he continued:

"By the way, there was a bank failure at Cloverdale once that interested
you. Did you ever investigate it?"

"There was nothing to investigate," Asher replied.

It did not occur to him to connect the query with Carey's knowledge of
Shirley's affairs or with his studying in the East.

"You have relatives there?" Carey asked.

"Yes, a Jane Aydelot. Married, single, widowed, I can't tell. My father
left his estate to her. I was in love with the West then, and madly in
love with my wife. My father wasn't impressed with either one. But, you
see, I was rash about little things like money matters. I had so much
faith in my