“How soon does this involuntary servitude end?” Thaine inquired.
“A fortnight will do all that is possible for us,” Carey answered.
“Then I’ll enlist with the regulars,” Thaine declared.
“Do you mean to follow a military life?” Carey inquired, bending forward to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play of moonbeams on his silvery hair.
“No, not always,” Thaine responded.
“Then why don’t you go home now?” Carey went on.
Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to 363 his full height, the strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face the firing line had graven a nobility the old brown Kansas prairies had never seen.
He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with the soil. At length he said slowly:
“Dr. Carey, when I saw Lieutenant Alford brought in I counted the cost again. Only American ideals of government and civilization can win this wilderness. For this Alford’s blood was shed. He wrote to his mother on Christmas day that he was studying here to get his Master’s Degree from the Kansas University. I saw him just after he had received his diploma for that Degree. I was a fairly law-abiding civilian. The first shot of the campaign last February began in me what Alford’s sacrifice completed. I am waiting to see what next. But I have one thing firmly fixed now. Warfare only opens the way for the wilderness winners to come in and make a kingdom. The Remington rifle runs back the frontier line; the plowshare holds the land at last. I want, when my service here is done, to go back to the wheatfields and the cornfields. I want to smell the alfalfa and see the prairie windbreaks and be king of a Kansas farm. I’ve lost my ambition for gold 364 lace. I want a bigger mental ring of growth every year, and I believe the biggest place for me to get this will be with my feet on the prairie sod. Meantime, I shall reenlist, as I said.”
“Sit down, Thaine, and let me ask you one question,” Dr. Carey said.