cian, and the blessing of the Great
Physician, from whom is all health, at last prevailed, and he came back
sturdily to life and strength.

As the two men sat enjoying the hour Dr. Carey suddenly asked:

"After this hospital service, what next?"

"How soon does this involuntary servitude end?" Thaine inquired.

"A fortnight will do all that is possible for us," Carey answered.

"Then I'll enlist with the regulars," Thaine declared.

"Do you mean to follow a military life?" Carey inquired, bending forward
to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play
of moonbeams on his silvery hair.

"No, not always," Thaine responded.

"Then why don't you go home now?" Carey went on.

Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to his full height, the
strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face
the firing line had graven a nobility the old brown Kansas prairies had
never seen.

He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully
understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his
career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the
Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the
belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man
behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and
mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with
the soil. At length he said slowly:

"Dr. Carey, when I saw Lieutenant Alford brought in I counted the cost
again. Only American ideals of government and civilization can win this
wilderness. For this Alford's blood was shed. He wrote to his mother on
Christmas day that he was studying here to get his Master's Degree from
the Kansas University. I saw him just after he had received his diploma
for that Degree. I was a fairly law-abiding civilian. The first shot of
the campaign last February began in me what Alford's sacrifice completed.
I am waiting to see what next. But I have one thing firmly fixed now.
Warfare only opens the way for the wilderness winners to come in and make
a kingdom. The Remington rifle runs back the frontier line; the plowshare
holds the land at last. I want, when my service here is done, to go back
to the wheatfields and the cornfields. I want to smell the alfalfa and see
the prairie windbreaks and be king of a Kansas farm. I've lost my ambition
for gold lace. I want a bigger