He had said more; he had kept on calling to her till the big woods swallowed him. But she had understood nothing after that last awful charge. It had happened more than fifteen years before, but for many and many a day thereafter, sensitive mite that she had been, she would run and hide in the hay-mow whenever she saw her father or the boys coming from town with the mail. It was years before the horror of the expected packet containing the fair hair of her young uncle, dabbled with blood, fell away from her. Gradually the awfulness of that dread expectation passed away. Now, that same dear uncle was a man of power and position in the new land that had graciously permitted him his scalp. Only last November he had been reëlected to his third term on the bench of his circuit with a big, heart-stirring majority. In the day of his prosperity he had not forgotten the little, tangle-haired girl who had cried so inconsolably when he went away, and the unaccountable horror in whose eyes he had tried to laugh away on that never-to-be-forgotten day when he had wrenched his heartstrings from their safe abiding-place and gone forth in quest of the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end—the first of many generations. Tradition knew no other since his ancestors had felled forests and built homes of hewn logs. Now he had sent for Louise. His court reporter had recently left him for other fields of labor. There was commotion among her people on receipt of the astounding proposition. She lived over again the dark days of the first flitting. It might well be her uncle had exaggerated the dangers of life in the new land. It was great fun to shock his credulous relatives. He had surely written them some enormous tales during those fifteen years and more. He used to chuckle heartily to himself at reading some of the sympathizing replies. But these tales were held in evidence against him now that he dared to want Louise. Every letter was brought out by Louise’s dear old grandmother and read to her over again. Louise did not half believe them, but they were gospel truth to her grandmother and almost so to her father and mother as well. She remembered the old spirit of fun rampant in her favorite uncle, and while his vivid pictures took all the color from her sensitive face, deep down in her heart she recognized them for what they were worth. The letters were a strange medley of grasshoppers, blizzards, and Indians. But a ten-dollar per diem was a great temptation over a five-dollar per diem, and times were pretty hard on the old farm. More than all, the inexplicable something that had led her uncle to throw tradition to the four winds of heaven was calling her persistently and would not be denied. So she had written to him for the truth.