“I will go for you, Shirley,” Horace Carey said. “You forget who brought you this letter. That it was sent to me for you, and that the time to give it to you was left until I was notified. This friend of your brother’s wife is a friend of mine. Let me go.” 154
“Horace Carey, since the night your Virginia regiment fed us poor starving fellows in the old war times, you’ve been true blue.”
“Well, I wore the gray that night, and I’d probably do it again. I can’t tell. It was worth wearing, if only for men to find out how much bigger manhood and brotherhood are than any issue of war to be satisfied only by shedding of innocent blood,” Horace Carey replied, glad to lift the burden of thought from Shirley’s mind.
“Could a sectional war ever have begun out here on these broad prairies, where men need each other so?” Pryor Gaines asked, following the doctor’s lead.
“Something remarkably like it did make a stir out here once. Like it, only worse,” Horace Carey answered with a smile. “But the little girl, what’s her name? Leigh? We’ll have her here for you. Your service is only beginning, but think of the comfort of such a service. I envy you, Jim.”
“A little child shall lead them,” Pryor Gaines added reverently.
Then they fell to talking of the coming of little Leigh Shirley. The hours of the day slipped by. The breeze came pouring over the prairie from the far southwest where the purple notches stood sentinel. The warm afternoon sunlight streamed in at the door. The while these childless men planned together for the welfare of one motherless, and worse than fatherless, little girl away in the Clover Creek Valley in Ohio, waiting for a home and guardianship and love under far Kansas skies.