"

They sat down by the cabin door to watch the storm and flame blown far
away in whirls of glaring light and surging cloud, until the rain at last
drowned all the fury and washed it over the edge of the south horizon out
of the world.

"Sometime we'll plant hedges and forest trees and checker the country with
windbreaks until days like this will belong only to an old pioneer's
memory," Asher said, as the storm swept wide away.

"Then, I'm glad I came early enough to see this. I'm getting
'plains-broke' along with Juno. Isn't it wonderful to be a real pioneer?
Back in Virginia we were two centuries of generations away from the first
settlers," Virginia exclaimed.

But Asher did not answer. He was thinking of Jim Shirley's declaration:
"She's got endurance as well as grace and beauty."

CHAPTER IV

DISTRESS SIGNALS

Also, we will make promise. So long as the Blood endures,
I shall know that your will is mine; ye shall feel that
my strength is yours.
--A Song of the English.

Virginia Aydelot soon grew brown as a berry in the tanning prairie winds,
and it seemed impossible that this strong young woman of the sod cabin,
with her simple dress and her cheeks abloom, could have been the dainty
child of the old Southern mansion house.

No other autumn had ever seemed quite so beautiful to the Aydelots as
this, their first autumn together. Life was before them with its call to
victory. Youth and health, exuberant spirits and love were theirs. Theirs,
too, was the great boundless world of mists and mirages, of rainbow tinted
grasses and opal heavens, where no two sunsets were ever the same. They
could laugh at their poverty, believing in a time when Ease and Plenty
would rule the land where now they must fight for the bare necessities of
existence, picturing life not as it was then with its many hardships, but
as it would be in a future day when the real world whose last outpost they
had left almost fifty miles to the eastward, should move toward them and
help to people the prairies.

All the week days were full of duties, but every Sabbath morning found the
three settlers of the valley making a prairie sanctuary of the Aydelot
cabin. The elder Aydelots had not united with any church, but Asher and
Jim, when they were only boys, had been converted at a Methodist revival
in Cloverdale. It was an old-fashioned kind of religious leading, but it
was