ey to purple, ran back to the dusky
east, and the little cool breeze that came up out of the silence and
flowed into the room had in it the qualities of snow-chilled wine. A star
hung low to the westward in a field of palest green, and a shaded lamp
burned dimly at one end of the great bare room.

By it the Fraeulein Muller, flaxen-haired, plump, and blue-eyed, sat
knitting, and Larry's eyes grew a trifle wistful when he glanced at her.
It was a very long while since any woman had crossed his threshold, and
the red-cheeked fraeulein gave the comfortless bachelor dwelling a
curiously homelike appearance. Nevertheless, it was not the recollection
of its usual dreariness that called up the sigh, for Larry Grant had had
his dreams like other men, and Miss Muller was not the woman he had now
and then daringly pictured sitting there. Her father, perhaps from force
of habit, sat with a big meerschaum in hand, by the empty stove, and if
his face expressed anything at all it was phlegmatic content. Opposite him
sat Breckenridge, a young Englishman, lately arrived from Minnesota.

"What do you think of the land, now you've seen it?" asked Grant.

Muller nodded reflectively. "Der land is good. It is der first-grade hard
wheat she will grow. I three hundred and twenty acres buy."

"Well," said Grant, "I'm willing to let you have it; but I usually try to
do the square thing, and you may have trouble before you get your first
crop in."

"Und," said Muller, "so you want to sell?"

Grant laughed. "Not quite; and I can't sell that land outright. I'll let
it to you while my lease runs, and when that falls in you'll have the same
right to homestead a quarter or half section for nothing as any other man.
In the meanwhile, I and one or two others are going to start wheat-growing
on land that is ours outright, and take our share of the trouble."

"Ja," said Muller, "but dere is much dot is not clear to me. Why you der
trouble like?"

"Well," said Grant, "as I've tried to tell you, it works out very much
like this. It was known that this land was specially adapted to mixed
farming quite a few years ago, but the men who ran their cattle over it
never drove a plough. You want to know why? Well, I guess it was for much
the same reason that an association of our big manufacturers bought up the
patents of an improved process, and for a long while never made an ounce
of material under them, or let any one else try. We had to pay more than
i