Some one to share her refuge.

Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock.

She dismissed him.  He was too cautious.  She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own.  And she would never find it.  Youth would never come singing.  She was beaten.

Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of
Gopher Prairie.

Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson.  Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it.  Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room.

“Well, well, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead.

“You seem so excited,” sighed Mrs. Dawson.

“I am!  Mr. Dawson, aren’t you a millionaire?”

He cocked his head, and purred, “Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I’ve made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every——­”

“I think I want most of it from you!”

The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, “You’re worse than Reverend Benlick!  He don’t hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars—­at a time!”

“I’m not joking.  I mean it!  Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do.  You don’t want to die and leave your name unknown.  Why not do a big, original thing?  Why not rebuild the whole town?  Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie.  Perhaps he’d create some entirely new form of architecture.  Then tear down all these shambling buildings——­”

Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it.  He wailed, “Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!”

“But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!”

“Me?  Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money?  Not that I’ve ever been mean.  Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work—­when we could find one.  But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and—­spend it on a lot of these rascals——?”

“Please!  Don’t be angry!  I just mean—­I mean——­Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town——­”

“Why now, child, you’ve got a lot of notions.  Besides what’s the matter with the town?  Looks good to me.  I’ve had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest.  Good enough for anybody.  Certainly good enough for Mama and me.  Besides!  Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there.”