to their county seat to give their children the benefit of a
graded school. Later still came the passing of the wheat, a re-peopling
of the farms by a fresh influx of home-seekers from the Old World, and
the birth, in Wahaska and elsewhere, of the industrial era.

Jasper Grierson was a product of the wheat-growing period. The son of
one of the earliest of the New-York-State homesteaders in the wheat
belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was
unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of
it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and
vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added
that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only
one, and that one a woman.

After the westward vanishing, Wahaska saw him no more until he returned
in his vigorous prime, a veteran soldier of fortune upon whom the
goddess had poured a golden shower out of some cornucopia of the
Colorado mines. Although rumor, occasionally naming him during the years
of absence, had never mentioned a wife, he was accompanied by a
daughter, a dark-eyed, red-lipped young woman, a rather striking beauty
of a type unfamiliar to Wahaska and owing nothing, it would seem, to the
grim, gray-wolf Jasper.

With the return to his birthplace, Jasper Grierson began a campaign, the
planning of which had tided him over many an obstacle in the road to
fortune. It had given him the keenest thrill of joy of which a frankly
sordid nature is capable to descend upon his native town rich enough to
buy and sell any round dozen of the well-to-do farmers; and when he had
looked about him he settled down to the attainment of his heart's
desire, which was to have the casting vote in the business affairs of
the community which had once known him as a helper in a livery stable.

Losing sight of the irresistible energy and momentum of wealth as
wealth, men said that fortune favored him from the outset. It was only a
half-truth, but it sufficed to account for what was really a campaign of
conquest. Grierson's touch was Midas-like, turning all things to gold;
and even in Wahaska there were Mammon worshippers enough to hail him as
a public benefactor whose wealth and enterprise would shortly make of
the overgrown village a town, and of the town a thriving city.

Since the time was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its
swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; whe