"The sun lay dying in the west,
The fresh breeze fanned my brow,
I rode the steed I loved the best—
Would I were riding now."
I.—THE FIRST FLIGHT
Most written stories end with a wedding, actual or prospective; but this story, like most stories in real life, begins with one. The little old stone church in Manhattan, Kansas, was crowded to the doors one June afternoon. The gray-haired President, the younger men and women of the faculty, and a small sprinkling of the towns-people were there; but the great mass of the congregation was made up of the students of the State Agricultural College, which was situated on a gentle hill just outside the town. It was Graduation Day, and the day on which Sue Belle Seville and Samuel Maxwell had elected to get married.
Samuel was a Kansas boy, Sue Belle a Kentucky girl. They were both orphans and both graduates from the college that day in the same class: Samuel from the agricultural and mechanical department, Sue Belle from the housekeeping, culinary, domestic sciences, and other of the many departments feminine. Maxwell was a manly, energetic, capable fellow, a good student, and a young man who, given an equal chance, should make a fine farmer. On that day he was the envy of all the young men of marriageable age in the college.
His bride to be, while she seemed made for better things than the ineffably monotonous drudgery of an ordinary farmer's wife, was nevertheless skilled enough, capable enough, resolute enough, to master her lot and be happy in it whatever it might be. She was a handsome girl, tall, straight, strong, black-haired, blue-eyed, with the healthiest whiteness in her face that one could imagine.
The brief wedding ceremony was soon over. Old Dr. Fairman, the President, gave the bride away in his usual courtly and distinguished manner, and as the village organist played the wedding-march on the sweet-toned old organ, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Maxwell passed out of the church, followed by all of the congregation. At the end of the long cinder foot-path extending from the church-door under the double row of trees to the street stood a brand-new Studebaker wagon filled with household goods. Two stout, well-conditioned horses were harnessed to it, while two others, a good mare and a handsome young horse, a three-year-old colt, were fastened to the tail-board by long hitching-straps. The wagon had been transformed by a canvas canopy over the bed into what was popularly known as a "prairie schooner." The new canvas was white as snow in the sunlight.
Maxwell handed his wife to the seat on the front, pitched quarters to the negro boys who had been holding the horses' heads, gathered up the reins, and, amid a storm of cheers and a shower of rice—especially appropriate to an agricultural college, by the way—and other manifestations of joy and delight, drove away on the wedding journey. The watchers followed with their eyes the wagon lumbering slowly down the main street until it crossed the bridge over the Kansas River and disappeared among the hills to the southward.