, in early August, and Rachel
asked me to take a stroll over the prairie to the southwest. The day had
been very hot, and the west had piled up some threatening thunderheads.
But the evening breezes fanned them away over the far horizon line and
the warm night air was light and dry. The sky was white with the clear
luminous moonlight of the open Plains country.

Rachel and I had wandered idly along the gentle rise of ground until we
could quite overlook the little treeless town with this Lincoln College
and the jagged portion of the State House wing gleaming up beyond.

"Hadn't we better turn back now? Your aunt cautioned us two strangers
here not to get lost." I was only hinting my wishes.

"Oh, let's go on to that tree. It's the only one here in this forsaken
country. Let's pay our respects to it," Rachel urged.

She was right. To an Easterner's eye it was a forsaken country. From the
Shunganunga Creek winding beneath a burden of low, black underbrush,
northward to the river with its fringe of huge cottonwoods, not a tree
broke the line of vision save this one sturdy young locust spreading its
lacy foliage in dainty grace on the very summit of the gentle swell of
land between the two streams. Up to its pretty shadowed spaces we took
our way. The grass was dry and brown with the August heat, and we rested
awhile on the moonlit prairie.

Rachel was strikingly handsome, and the soft light lent a certain tone
to her beauty. Her hair and eyes were very dark, and her face was clear
cut. There was a dash of boldness, an assumption of authority all
prettily accented with smiles and dimples that was very bewitching. She
was a subtle flatterer, and even the wisest men may be caught by that
bait. It was the undercurrent of sympathy, product of my life-long
ideals, my intense pity for the defenceless frontier, that divided my
mind and led me away from temptation that night.

"Rachel Melrose, we must go home," I insisted at last. "This tree is all
right, but I could show you a cottonwood out above the Neosho that
dwarfs this puny locust. And yet this is a gritty sort of sapling to
stand up here and grow and grow. I wonder if ever the town will reach
out so far as this."

I am told the tree is green and beautiful to-day, and that it is far
inside the city limits, standing on the old Huntoon road. About it are
substantial homes. South of it is a pretty park now, while near it on
the west is a handsome church, one of the city'