in the late Civil War, which seems trifling to you fellows at
the Presidio. I rode the Plains for some years more when rattlesnakes and
Indian arrows--poisoned at that--and cholera and mountain fever called for
a surgeon's aid. I have diplomas and things from the best schools in the
East. I have also some good military friends in authority to back me in
getting a surgeon's place in the army--and, lastly, I haven't a soul to
miss me, nor home to leave dreary, if I get between you and the enemy;
nobody but Boanerges Peeperville to care personally, and Mrs. Aydelot, as
the only other aristocrat in the Grass River Valley, has promised to give
him a home. He has always adored Virginia, Thaine, since he could remember
anything."

Thaine Aydelot was only twenty-one, with little need hitherto for
experience in reading human nature. Moreover, he was alert in every
tingling nerve with the anticipation of an ocean voyage and of strange new
sights and daring deeds half a world away. Yet something in Dr. Carey's
strong face seemed to imply a deeper purpose than his words suggested. A
faint sense of the nobility of the man gripped him and grew upon him, and
never in the years that followed was separate from the memory of the
doctor he had loved from babyhood.

* * * * *

When the Ohio woodlands were gorgeous with the frost-fired splendor of
October word came to Miss Jane Aydelot, of the old Aydelot farmhouse
beside the National pike road, that one Thaine Aydelot had sailed from San
Francisco with the Twentieth Kansas Regiment to see service in the
Philippine Islands. On board the same transport was Dr. Horace Carey, of
the military medical staff. That winter Jane Aydelot's hair turned white,
but the pink bloom of her cheeks and the light of her clear gray eyes made
her a sweet-faced woman still, whose loveliness grew with the years.

The kiss of the same October breezes was on the Kansas prairie with the
hazy horizon and the infinite beauty of wide, level landscapes, overhung
by the infinite beauty of blue, tender skies. Boanerges Peeperville,
established as cook in the Sunflower Inn, was at home in his cosy little
quarter beside the grape arbor of the rear dooryard.

"Tell me, Bo Peep, why Dr. Carey should enter the army again and go to the
Philippines?" Virginia Aydelot asked on the day the news reached the
Sunflower Ranch.

Bo Peep did not answer at once. Virginia was busy arranging