Below them lay “The Cottonwoods” and the winding stream whose course, marked by the dark green line of shrubbery, stretched away toward Grass River far to the southeast. To the westward a wonderful vista of level prairie spread endlessly, wherein no line of shrubbery marked a watercourse nor tree rose up to break the circle of the horizon. Over all this vast plain the three headlands stood as sentinels. In the west the sunlight had pierced a heavy cloudbank and was pouring through the rift in one broad sheet of gold mist from sky to earth. Purple and silver and burnt umber, with green and gray and richest orange, blended all in the tones of the landscape, overhung now by a storm-girdled sky.
“This prairie belongs mostly to John Jacobs now and it is just as it was when the Indians called it the Grand Prairie and the old Pawnees came down here every summer to hunt buffalo. Some day, soon, there will be a sea of wheat flowing over all that level plain,” Thaine said. 284
“And up here a home with nothing to cut off a fragment of the whole horizon. Think of seeing every sunrise and every sunset from a place like this,” Leigh said, her face aglow with an artist’s love of beauty. “It’s farther to China than I used to think when I dreamed of a purple velvet house decorated with gold knobs beyond these three headlands.”
“I always did want to live on the Purple Notches,” Thaine said reminiscently. “I’m glad we came up here today.”
The sound of singing came faintly up from the valley far away.
“The crowd is mobilized. See the wagons crawling out of the grove and the civilians in citizens’ clothes following in carriages,” Thaine said as he watched the picnic party pushing out toward the eastward. “I’m so glad we aren’t with them.”
Leigh sat leaning forward, looking at the majestic distances lost in purple haze, overshadowed by purple clouds with gold-broidered edges of sunlight.
“The world is all ours for once. We see all there is of it and yet we are alone in it up here on the purple notches I used to dream about,” she said softly.
Thaine leaned back in his buggy and looked at Leigh with the same impenetrable expression on his countenance that was always there when she was present.
“Leigh,” he said at last, “if you didn’t have Uncle Jim what would you do?”