ded. "You join him on the south. You ought to
know some of his notions."

"Gaines has no land to consider," Asher said frankly. "He sold it more
than a year ago."

"You mean the Jew foreclosed on the preacher, don't you?" someone said
sarcastically.

"You'll have to ask the preacher," Asher replied good-naturedly. "I
didn't understand it so at the time. But as for myself, I'm no boomer. I
stand for the prosperity that builds from day to day, and stays built. The
values here are in the soil, not in the shining bubbles that glitter and
burst on top of it. You'll have to count me out of your scheme. I'm a
farmer still. So I'll wish you all good luck and good night."

"Good night, I must go with papa," Thaine Aydelot said, springing up from
his play outside.

"No, you've got to stay here. Hold him, Leigh," Jo Bennington commanded,
clutching at Thaine's arm.

Leigh sat calmly disobedient.

"He's his papa's boy, I guess, and he ought to go," she asserted.

"You meany, meany," Jo whispered, "I don't like you."

But Leigh paid little heed to her opinion.

As Asher passed out of the room there was an ugly look in Darley Champers'
eyes.

"No more ambition than a cat. One of them quiet, good-natured fellers that
are as stubborn as the devil once they take a stand. Just a danged
clod-hopper farmer, but he don't leave no enemies behind him. That's
enough to make any man hate him. He's balked twice when I tried to drive.
I'll not be fooled by him always."

So Champers thought as he watched Asher Aydelot walk out of the room. And
in the silence that followed his going the company heard him through the
open window whistling some old patriotic air as he strode away in the June
moonlight with little Thaine trotting beside him.

"Shirley, where is Pryor tonight?" Cyrus Bennington broke the silence with
the query. "I couldn't get him to come; said he had no land for sale nor
money to invest," Jim replied.

"Then Jacobs got him at last. Fine friend to you fellers, that man Jacobs.
Easy to see what he wants. He ain't boomin' no place but Careyville,"
Champers snarled. "But the deep bend ain't the only bend in Grass River.
Or do you want to shove prosperity away when it comes right to your
door?"

Nobody wants to do that. Least of all did the Kansas settlers of the boom
days turn away from the promise of a fortune.

So the boom came to the Grass River Valley as other disasters had come
before it. Where a decade and a half