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"It you want to go to hell with Ed Kinney, you can. I won’t say a word. That’s where he’ll take you. You won’t see me again. "

This he signed and sealed, and then he bowed his head and wept like a girl. But his tears did not soften the effect of the letter. It went as straight to its mark as he meant it should. It tore a seared and ragged path to an innocent, happy heart, and be took a savage pleasure in the thought of it as he rode away on the cars toward the South.

III

The seven years lying between 1880 and 1887 made a great change in Rock River and in The adjacent farming land. Signs changed and firms went out of business with characteristic Western ease of shift. The trees grew rapidly, dwarfing The houses beneath them, and contrasts of newness and decay thickened.

Will found The country changed, as he walked along The dusty road from Rock River toward "The Comers. " The landscape was at its fairest and liberalest, with its seas of corn deep green and moving with a mournful rustle, in sharp contrast to its flashing blades; its gleaming fields of barley, and its wheat already mottled with soft gold in The midst of its pea-green.

The changes were in The hedges, grown higher, In The greater predominance of cornfields and cattle pastures, but especially in The destruction of homes. As he passed on Will saw The grass growing and cattle feeding on a dozen places where homes had once stood. They had given place to The large farm and The stock raiser. Still The whole scene was bountiful and very beautiful to The eye.

It was especially grateful to Will, for he had spent nearly all his years of absence among The rocks, treeless swells, and bleak cliffs of The Southwest. The crickets rising before his dusty feet appeared to him something sweet and suggestive and the cattle feeding in The clover moved him to deep thought–they were so peaceful and slow-motioned.

As he reached a little popple tree by the roadside, he stopped, removed his broad-brimmed hat, put his elbows on the fence, and looked hungrily upon The scene. The sky was deeply blue, with only here and there a huge, heavy, slow-moving, massive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a berg of ice in a shoreless sea of azure.

In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and The sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a king bird clattered overhead. He noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that The softened sound of the far-off reaper was at times exactly like The hum of a bluebottle fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears.

A slender and very handsome young man was shocking grain near The fence, working so desperately he did not see Will until greeted by him. He looked up, replied to The greeting, but kept on till he had finished his last stook, then he came to the shade of the tree and took off his hat

"Nice day to sit under a tree and fish. "

Will smiled. "I ought to know you, I suppose; I used to live here years ago. "

"Guess not; we came in three years ago. "

The young man was quick-spoken and very pleasant to look at. Will felt freer with him.

"Are The Kinneys still living over there?" He nodded at a group of large buildings.

"Tom lives there. Old man lives with Ed. Tom ousted The old man some way, nobody seems to know how, and so he lives with Ed. "

Will wanted to ask after Agnes, but hardly felt able. "I s’pose John Hannan is on his old farm?"

"Yes. Got a good crop this year. "

Will looked again at The fields of rustling wheat over which The clouds rippled, and said with an air of conviction: "This lays over Arizona, dead sure. "

"You’re from Arizona, then?"

"Yes–a good ways from it"’ Will replied in a way that stopped further question. "Good luck!" he added as he walked on down The road toward The creek, musing. "And the spring–I wonder if that’s there yet. I’d like a drink. " The sun seemed hotter than at noon, and he walked slowly. At the bridge that spanned the meadow brook, just where it widened over a sandy ford, he paused again. He hung over the rail and looked at the minnows swimming there.