Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and “Lolly,” on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on the same small farm. The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces. Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out. “Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!” “We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.” But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men. “You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric youth,” said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!” There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart. “By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell, do you? Got any idea where it is?” “Yes.” “Ho! You have!” “Some hot chunks of it in this town.” “You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof off. What church are you, anyhow?” “I'm no church. I'm a freak.” “Ho! You don't say!” “I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.” But they did not find him.