“We’ll try it, Juno and I,” Virginia replied.
“Thoroughbreds, both of ’em,” Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and Pryor Gaines’ face expressed the things he could not say.
“I believe that is the best thing to do,” Asher Aydelot declared.
Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.
As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence had slipped away from the sunset.
“‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Virginia said to herself. “Has He forgotten the earth which is His also?”
She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher, standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her. 108
“Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike road? He gave it all up for me—all his inheritance for me and this.”
She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.
“I’ll tell him tonight I’m ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and Asher can live where his boyhood days were spent. My Virginia can never be as it was in my childhood, but Asher can have some of the pleasures of his eastern home.” She pushed back the sunbonnet from her face, and let the west breeze sweep across it.