lready begun
to clothe the prairie world with beauty and fragrance.

The mother never tired of taking her girls on the hill beyond the creek
and watching the men at work on the wide sweeping plains that melted
into the skyline miles beyond. Something in its vast silence, in its
message of the infinite, soothed her spirit. All her life in the East
she had been fighting against losing odds. These wide breathing plains
had stricken the shackles from her soul.

She was free.

Sometimes she felt like shouting it into the sky. Sometimes she knelt
among the trees and thanked God for His mercy in giving her the new
lease of life.

The new lease on life had depth and meaning because she lived and
breathed in her children. Her man had a man's chance at last. Her boys
had a chance.

The one thing that gave her joy day and night was the consciousness of
living among the men and women of her own race. There was not a negro
in the county, bond or free, and she fervently prayed that there never
would be. Now that they were free from the sickening dread of such
competition in life, she had no hatred of the race. As a free white
woman, the mother of free white men and women, all she asked was freedom
from the touch of an inferior. She had always felt instinctively that
this physical contact was poison. She breathed deeply for the first
time.

There was just one cloud on the horizon which threatened her peace and
future. Her husband, after the fashion of his kind, in the old world and
the new, had always held political opinions and had dared to express
them without fear or favor. In Virginia his vote was sought by the
leaders of the county. He had been poor but he had influence because he
dared to think for himself.

He was a Southern born white man, and he held the convictions of his
birthright. He had never stopped to analyze these faiths. He believed in
them as he believed in God. They were things not to be questioned.

Doyle had not hesitated to express his opinions in Kansas as in
Virginia. The few Southern settlers on the Pottawattomie Creek were
sympathetic and no trouble had come. But the keen ears of the woman had
caught ominous rumors on the plains.

The father and mother sat on a rude board settee which John had built.
The boy had nailed it against a black jack close beside the bend of
the creek where the ripple of the hurrying waters makes music when the
stream is low and swells into a roar when gorged by the rain