"Never fear, dad," replied Lenore, "it was I who first told you to look here."
"Terrible big and bare, but grand!" exclaimed Kathleen.
Lenore looked first at Dorn's face as he gazed away across the length and breadth of land. Could that land mean as much to him as it did before he went to war? Infinitely more, she saw, and rejoiced. Her faith was coming home to her in verities. Then she thrilled at the wide prospect before her.
It was a scene that she knew could not be duplicated in the world. Low, slow-sloping, billowy green hills, bare and smooth with square brown patches, stretched away to what seemed infinite distance. Valleys and hills, with less fallow ground than ever before, significant and striking: lost the meager details of clumps of trees and dots of houses in a green immensity. A million shadows out of the west came waving over the wheat. They were ripples of an ocean of grain. No dust-clouds, no bleached roads, no yellow hills to-day! June, and the desert found its analogy only in the sweep and reach! A thousand hills billowing away toward that blue haze of mountain range where rolled the Oregon. Acreage and mileage seemed insignificant. All was green—green, the fresh and hopeful color, strangely serene and sweet and endless under the azure sky. Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long lines of roads running everywhither, overwhelmingly pregnant with meaning—wheat—wheat—wheat—nothing but wheat, a staggering visual manifestation of vital need, of noble promise.
"That—that!" rolled out Anderson, waving his big hand, as if words were useless. "Only a corner of the great old U.S.!… What would the Germans say if they could look out over this?… What do you say, Lenore?"
"Beautiful!" she replied, softly. "Like the rainbow in the sky—God's promise of life!"
"An', Kathie, what do you say?" went on Anderson.
"Some wheat-fields!" replied Kathleen, with an air of woman's wisdom. "Fetch on your young wheat-sowers, dad, and I'll pick out a husband."
"An' you, son?" finished Anderson, as if wistfully, yet heartily playing his last card. He was remembering Jim—the wild but beloved son—the dead soldier. He was fearful for the crowning hope of his years.
"As ye sow—so shall ye reap!" was Dorn's reply, strong and thrilling. And Lenore felt her father's strange, heart-satisfying content.