"Wal, I'll be dog-goned!" ejaculated Anderson. "What's the matter with him?"
"Dad, he is proud," replied Lenore, dreamily. "He's had a hard struggle out there in his desert of wheat. They've always been poor. He imagines there's a vast distance between an heiress of 'Many Waters' and a farmer boy. Then, more than all, I think, the war has fixed a morbid trouble in his mind. God knows it must be real enough! A house divided against itself is what he called his home. His father is German. He is American. He worshiped his mother, who was a native of the United States. He has become estranged from his father. I don't know—I'm not sure—but I felt that he was obsessed by a calamity in his German blood. I divined that was the great reason for his eagerness to go to war."
"Wal, Kurt Dorn's not goin' to war," replied her father. "I fixed that all right."
An amazing and rapturous start thrilled over Lenore. "Daddy!" she cried, leaping up in his arms, "what have you done?"
"I got exemption for him, that's what," replied Anderson, with great satisfaction.
"Exemption!" exclaimed Lenore, in bewilderment.
"Don't you remember the government official from Washington? You met him in Spokane. He was out West to inspire the farmers to raise more wheat. There are many young farmers needed a thousand times more on the wheat-fields than on the battle-fields. An' Kurt Dorn is one of them. That boy will make the biggest sower of wheat in the Northwest. I recommended exemption for Dorn. An' he's exempted an' doesn't know it."
"Doesn't know! He'll never accept exemption," declared Lenore.
"Lass, I'm some worried myself," rejoined Anderson. "Reckon you've explained Dorn to me—that somethin' queer about him.… But he's sensible. He can be told things. An' he'll see how much more he's needed to raise wheat than to kill Germans."
"But, father—suppose he wants to kill Germans?" asked Lenore, earnestly. How strangely she felt things about Dorn that she could not explain.