Far up the slow-rising bulge of valley slope above the gleaming river two cars climbed leisurely and rolled on over the height into what seemed a bare and lonely land of green.

It was a day in June, filled with a rich, thick, amber light, with a fragrant warm wind blowing out of the west.

At a certain point on this road, where Anderson always felt compelled to halt, he stopped the car this day and awaited the other that contained Lenore and Dorn.

Lenore’s joy in the ride was reflected in her face.  Dorn rested comfortably beside her, upon an improvised couch.  As he lay half propped up by pillows he could see out across the treeless land that he knew.  His eyes held a look of the returned soldier who had never expected to see his native land again.  Lenore, sensitive to every phase of his feeling, watched him with her heart mounting high.

Anderson got out of his car, followed by Kathleen, who looked glad and mischievous and pretty as a wild rose.

“I just never can get by this place,” explained the rancher, as he came and stood so that he could put a hand on Dorn’s knee.  “Look, son—­an’ Lenore, don’t you miss this.”

“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?”