t
me with a mysterious grin on his face, as I told him of the loss of the
county funds.

"Well," said he, "this will make history. I venture the assertion that
the case will be compromised. I can't see this close corporation of a
county government making Stone's bondsmen pay the loss. Or Stone either.
And I can't see any one getting that amount of money out of old Wade,
whether it was in the bag when it went into his safe or not. Your
testimony on the jingle feature ain't worth a cuss. The Bunker boys had
that bag marked for their own; for we know now that they were out on a
raid that night and cleaned up several good horses. I must say, Jake,
that you are a hell of a hired man. If you had kept the main road, this
trouble which will raise blazes with things in this county till you and
I are gray-headed, never would have happened. The Bunkers would have had
that salt, and everybody else would have had an alibi. Maybe it was
Judge Stone's instinct for party harmony that made him cross at you for
dodging the Bunkers by driving down by the Hoosier settlement. He was
cross, wasn't he? Instinct is a great matter, says Falstaff. He was mad
on instinct, I reckon! And you drove off the road on instinct. Beware
instinct,' say I on the authority aforesaid. It would have smoothed
matters all out if the Bunker boys had got that salt!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE FEWKESES IN CLOVER AT BLUE-GRASS MANOR

Iowa lived in the future in those days. It was a land of poverty and
privations and small things, but a land of dreams. We shivered in the
winter storms, and dreamed; we plowed and sowed and garnered in; but the
great things, the happy things, were our dreams and visions. We felt
that we were plowing the field of destiny and sowing for the harvest of
history; but we scarcely thought it. The power that went out of us as we
scored that wonderful prairie sod and built those puny towns was the
same power that nerved the heart of those who planted Massachusetts and
Rhode Island and Virginia, the power that has thrilled the world
whenever the white man has gone forth to put a realm under his feet.

Our harvest of that day seems pitifully small as I sit on my veranda and
look at my barns and silos, and see the straight rows of corn leaning
like the characters of God's handwriting across the broad intervale of
Vandemark's Folly flat, sloping to the loving pressure of the steady
warm west wind of Iowa, and clapping a million dark green hands in