ot there
and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and
make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your
sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a
rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your
youth.--Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be
sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll
join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and
perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old
New England custom and be happy."

Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go
back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is
Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which
to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too
much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes.
He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it
out right here or farther west."

To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone.
Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort,
back to a real home beside her brothers."

As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of
the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother
sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once
more, but I never shall."

"Yes, you shall," I asserted.

We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the
sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we
decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's
Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest
of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?

"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For
fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from
certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For
thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey--to what end?
Here you are,--snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and
crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout
face. _You must take the back trail._ It will hurt, but it must be
done."

"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life,
and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had thre