"Kansas seems determined to get rid of me, if hard knocks mean anything. I've had nothing but bumps and knotty problems since I landed on these sand-shifting prairies. It makes me mad and I'm not going to be run off by it." Jerry's eyes were darkly defiant and her lifted hand seemed strong to strike for herself.
"You have the real pioneer spirit," Joe declared. "It was that very determination not to be gotten rid of by a sturdy bunch of forefathers and mothers that has subdued a state, sometimes boisterous and belligerent, and sometimes snarling and catty, and made it willing to eat out of their hands."
"Oh, it's not all subdued yet. It never will be." Jerry pointed down the trail toward the far distance where her twelve hundred blowout-cursed acres lay.
Joe Thomson's mouth was set with a bulldog squareness. "Are we less able than our forefathers?" he asked.
"As to sand—yes," Jerry replied, "but to myself, as a first consideration, I'm dreadfully in trouble."
"Again?"
"Oh, always—in Kansas," Jerry declared. "First my whole inheritance is smothered in plain sand—and dies—hard but quickly. Then I fight out a battle for existence and win a schoolmarm's crown of—"
"Of service," Joe suggested, seriously.
"I hope so. I really do," Jerry assured him. "Next I lease my—dukedom for a small but vital sum of money on which to exist till—till—"
"Yes, till wheat harvest, figuratively speaking," Joe declared.