overdale and see only a grave--I can stay here and remember, and
maybe do a kind of a man's part, but I can't go back." He bowed his head
and sat very still.

"You are right, Shirley," Pryor Gaines spoke softly still. "Unless you
were close to the life in its last days, don't hang any graves like dead
weights of ineffectual sorrow about your neck. Look back to the best
memories. Look up to the eternal joy no grave can withhold."

There was a sympathetic chord in Pryor Gaines' voice that spoke home to
the heart, and so long as he lived in the Grass River valley, he gave the
last service for everyone who left it for the larger life beyond it.

"I will go for you, Shirley," Horace Carey said. "You forget who brought
you this letter. That it was sent to me for you, and that the time to give
it to you was left until I was notified. This friend of your brother's
wife is a friend of mine. Let me go."

"Horace Carey, since the night your Virginia regiment fed us poor starving
fellows in the old war times, you've been true blue."

"Well, I wore the gray that night, and I'd probably do it again. I can't
tell. It was worth wearing, if only for men to find out how much bigger
manhood and brotherhood are than any issue of war to be satisfied only by
shedding of innocent blood," Horace Carey replied, glad to lift the burden
of thought from Shirley's mind.

"Could a sectional war ever have begun out here on these broad prairies,
where men need each other so?" Pryor Gaines asked, following the doctor's
lead.

"Something remarkably like it did make a stir out here once. Like it, only
worse," Horace Carey answered with a smile. "But the little girl, what's
her name? Leigh? We'll have her here for you. Your service is only
beginning, but think of the comfort of such a service. I envy you, Jim."

"A little child shall lead them," Pryor Gaines added reverently.

Then they fell to talking of the coming of little Leigh Shirley. The hours
of the day slipped by. The breeze came pouring over the prairie from the
far southwest where the purple notches stood sentinel. The warm afternoon
sunlight streamed in at the door. The while these childless men planned
together for the welfare of one motherless, and worse than fatherless,
little girl away in the Clover Creek Valley in Ohio, waiting for a home
and guardianship and love under far Kansas skies.

CHAPTER X

THE COMING OF LOVE

I love the world with all its brave en