able to thresh enough wheat to repay their debt of six hundred
bushels and keep an additional three hundred of seed for the following
year. The remaining seven hundred and fifty they sold at twenty-five
cents a bushel by hauling them to Fort Scott--thirty miles distant. Each
trip meant ten dollars, but to the Wades, to whom this one hundred and
eighty-seven dollars--the first actual money they had seen in over a
year--was a fortune, these journeys were rides of triumph, fugitive
flashes of glory in the long, gray struggle.

That Fall they paid the first installment of two hundred dollars on
their land and Martin persuaded his mother to give and Robinson to take
a chattel on their two horses, old Brindle, her calf and the pigs, that
other much-needed implements might be bought. Mrs. Wade toiled early
and late, doing part of the chores and double her share of the Spring
plowing that Martin, as well as Nellie, could attend school in Fallon.

"I don't care about goin'," he had protested squirmingly.

But on this matter his mother was without compromise. "Don't say
that," she had commanded, her voice shaken and her eyes bright with the
intensity of her emotion; "you're goin' to get an education."

And Martin, surprised and embarrassed by his mother's unusual exhibition
of feeling, had answered, roughly: "Aw, well, all right then. Don't take
on. I didn't say I wouldn't, did I?"

He was twenty-three and Nellie sixteen when, worn out and broken down
before her time, her resistance completely undermined, Mrs. Wade died
suddenly of pneumonia. Within the year Nellie married Bert Mall, Peter's
eldest son, and Martin, at once, bought out her half interest in the
farm, stock and implements, giving a first mortgage to Robinson in order
to pay cash.

"I'm making it thirty dollars an acre," he explained.

"That's fair," conceded the banker, "though the time will come when
it will be cheap at a hundred and a half. There's coal under all this
county, millions of dollars' worth waiting to be mined."

"Maybe," assented Martin, laconically.

As he sat in the dingy, little backroom of the bank, while Robinson's
pen scratched busily drawing up the papers, he was conscious of an odd
thrill. The land--it was all his own! But with this thrill welled a wave
of resentment over what he considered a preposterous imposition. Who
had made the land into a farm? What had Nellie ever put into it that it
should be half hers? His mother--now, that