“I have done my work here,” Pryor was saying. “I have only one wish—to go back to old Grass River in Kansas and spend my days with Jim Shirley. We two will both live to be old because we are useless; and Leigh will be marrying one of these times, if the Lord ever made a man good enough for her. So Jim and I can chum along down the years together.”
“It is the place for you, Pryor,” Doctor Carey asserted. “And now that the ranch is making money while Jim sleeps, you two will be happy and busy as bees. Every neighborhood needs a man or two without family ties. You’ll be the most useful citizens in that corner of the prairies. And think of eating Jim Shirley’s cooking after this.” 394
“And you, Thaine? What now?” Pryor asked as he looked fondly at the young battle-tried soldier.
“I have done my work here,” Thaine quoted his words. “I’ve only one wish—to go back to old Grass River in Kansas to take my place on the prairie and win the soil to its best uses; to do as good a work as my father has done.”
Thaine’s dark eyes were luminous with hopefulness, and if a line of pathos for a loss in his life that nothing could fill had settled about his firm mouth, it took nothing from the manliness of the strong young face.
“And you, Carey?” Pryor asked.
Doctor Carey did not reply at once. A strange weariness had crept over his countenance, and a far-away look was in his eyes. The man who had forgotten himself in his service for others was coming swiftly toward his reward. But neither of his friends noted the change now. At last he said:
“Years ago I loved a girl as I never could care for any other girl. She would have loved me sooner or later if something hadn’t happened. A message from the man she cared for most fell into my hands one day long ago: a withered flower and a little card. I could have kept them back and won her for my wife, but I didn’t. I sent the message to her by a servant boy—and she has been happy always in her love.”
Doctor Carey turned his face away for the moment. Thaine Aydelot’s eyes were so much like Virginia Thaine’s to him just then. Presently he went on:
“Sometimes the thing we fail to get helps us to know better how to live and to live happily. You will not be 395 a coward, Thaine, when you come, year by year, to know the greater wilderness inside yourself. You will go back to the prairies where you belong, as you say, and you will do a man’s part in the big world that’s always needing men.”