Asher laughed now.
“No, I don’t remember anything about that. It was just the general line of events that stayed with me,” he said.
“Well, I do; and I’ll never forget the look in your eyes when you said it, neither. I’d told you, as I say, just to look at this God-forsaken old plain and tell me what you see. And you looked, like you was glimpsin’ heaven a’most, and just said sorter solemn like an’ prophetic: ‘I see a land fair as the Garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers—a land of comfortable homes and schoolhouses and churches, and no saloons nor breweries.’ And then I broke in and told you I see a danged fool, and you says, ‘Come down here in twenty-five year and make a hunt for me then.’ And, by golly, Aydelot, here I am. You’ve everlastingly conquered the prairies for sure, and you are a young man, not fifty-five yet.”
“Well, you can see most of those things that I saw that day out yonder, can’t you?”
Asher’s eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds’ songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.
“Yes, I’m still among the middle-aged,” he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. “But I don’t know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There’s still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. I’ll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the 335 battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I’ll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life?”
At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey’s letter, and the subject shifted to the problems of the far East.
“We aren’t the only people who are having trouble,” Asher said. “I read in the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance.”
“What’s them Boxers wantin’? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?” Darley Champers asked.
“Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look like a football game. I hope Pryor will not be in their line of march.”