Lydia nodded.  A hot breeze drifted through the woods and the pines sighed deeply.

“To have it and hold it for your children’s children,” exclaimed Lydia, passionately.  “You and yours to live on it forever.  And yet, I’d see a dead Indian baby and starving squaws behind every tree, I know I would.”

“I tell you what I’m going to do,” said Billy, doggedly.  “I’m going to get hold of that tract.  I’m not going to deceive myself that it’s all anything but a rotten, thieving game we whites are playing, but I’m going to do it, anyhow.”

“I’d like to myself,” Lydia still had the look of understanding, “but I’m afraid to!  I’d be haunted by Charlie Jackson’s eyes.”

“I’m going to get that tract.  I’ll pay for it, somehow, and I’ll go on doing what I can to see that the Indians get what’s left of a decent deal.”

Again the two listened to the wind in the pines, then Lydia said, “We must get back for the speeches.”

Billy started back, obediently.

“We’re grown up, aren’t we, Billy?” sighed Lydia.  “We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do and be, and I hate to think about it.  I hate important decisions.  Seems as though I’d been dogged by ’em all my life.”

“If I had my way,” cried Billy, unexpectedly, “you never should quite grow up.  You’d always be the dear little yellow-haired girl that tramped her legs off to earn my miserable old school books.  And that’s what you always will be to me—­the oldest and youngest little girl!  And whether you like me or not, I’ll tell you you’re not going to have any worries that I can help you ward off.”

They were emerging into the meadow and Lydia laughed up at him mischievously, “I’ve always thought I overpaid for those school books.  They were fearfully used up.  Oh, the speeches have begun,” and Billy was hard put to it to keep close to her as she rushed toward the speakers’ stand.

Levine had just finished his speech when Billy and Lydia got within hearing, and he introduced State Senator James Farwell as the chief speaker of the day.  Farwell had considerable history to cover in his speech.  He began with the Magna Charta and worked by elaborate stages through the French Revolution, the conquest of India, the death of Warren Hastings, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the Civil War to Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech.

His audience, standing in the burning sun, was restless.  The Indians, understanding little that was said, were motionless, but the whites drifted about, talked in undertones and applauded only when as a fitting peak to all the efforts of the ages toward freedom, Farwell placed the present freeing of the Indians from the reservation.

“The great fool!” said Billy to Lydia, as Farwell finally began to bow himself off the platform.

Levine rose and began, “Ladies and gentlemen, this ends our program.  We thank—­”