This wonderful place was an immense valley of considerable altitude called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on the west, the Coeur d’Alene and Bitter Root Mountains on the east, the Okanozan range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south.  The valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past.  The rainfall was slight except in the foot-hills of the mountains.  The Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered on three sides what was known as the Bend country.  South of this vast area, across the range, began the fertile, many-watered region that extended on down into verdant Oregon.  Among the desert hills of this Bend country, near the center of the Basin, where the best wheat was raised, lay widely separated little towns, the names of which gave evidence of the mixed population.  It was, of course, an exceedingly prosperous country, a fact manifest in the substantial little towns, if not in the crude and unpretentious homes of the farmers.  The acreage of farms ran from a section, six hundred and forty acres, up into the thousands.

* * * * *

Upon a morning in early July, exactly three months after the United States had declared war upon Germany, a sturdy young farmer strode with darkly troubled face from the presence of his father.  At the end of a stormy scene he had promised his father that he would abandon his desire to enlist in the army.

Kurt Dorn walked away from the gray old clapboard house, out to the fence, where he leaned on the gate.  He could see for miles in every direction, and to the southward, away on a long yellow slope, rose a stream of dust from a motor-car.

“Must be Anderson—­coming to dun father,” muttered young Dorn.

This was the day, he remembered, when the wealthy rancher of Ruxton was to look over old Chris Dorn’s wheat-fields.  Dorn owed thirty-thousand dollars and interest for years, mostly to Anderson.  Kurt hated the debt and resented the visit, but he could not help acknowledging that the rancher had been lenient and kind.  Long since Kurt had sorrowfully realized that his father was illiterate, hard, grasping, and growing worse with the burden of years.

“If we had rain now—­or soon—­that section of Bluestem would square father,” soliloquized young Dorn, as with keen eyes he surveyed a vast field of wheat, short, smooth, yellowing in the sun.  But the cloudless sky, the haze of heat rather betokened a continued drought.

There were reasons, indeed, for Dorn to wear a dark and troubled face as he watched the motor-car speed along ahead of its stream of dust, pass out of sight under the hill, and soon reappear, to turn off the main road and come toward the house.  It was a big, closed car, covered with dust.  The driver stopped it at the gate and got out.

“Is this Chris Dorn’s farm?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Kurt.