air as the Garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and
fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers--a land
of comfortable homes and schoolhouses and churches, and no saloons nor
breweries.' And then I broke in and told you I see a danged fool, and you
says, 'Come down here in twenty-five year and make a hunt for me then.'
And, by golly, Aydelot, here I am. You've everlastingly conquered the
prairies for sure, and you are a young man, not fifty-five yet."

"Well, you can see most of those things that I saw that day out yonder,
can't you?"

Asher's eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards,
the grove, full of birds' songs, and the line of Grass River running
deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought
of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.

"Yes, I'm still among the middle-aged," he said, straightening with his
habitual military dignity of bearing. "But I don't know about this
everlasting conquest of the prairies. There's still some of it waiting
over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big
holding. I'll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself
in civil life as well as on the battlefield. If I can bring him back when
he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done
something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I'll keep the wilderness
from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children
hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things
than we have done, do we really make a success of life?"

At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey's letter, and the
subject shifted to the problems of the far East.

"We aren't the only people who are having trouble," Asher said. "I read in
the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year
is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance."

"What's them Boxers wantin'? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?"
Darley Champers asked.

"Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics
bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement
in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this
distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the
warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look
like a football game. I hope Pryor will not