The quick enthusiasm in Breckenridge's face pleased her. "Larry's work is splendidly done already," he said. "He asked nothing for himself--and got no more; but now the State is offering every man the rights he fought for. The proclamations are out, and any citizen who wants it can take up his homestead grant. It will be something to remember that I carried his shield; but Larry has no more need of an armour-bearer." "I am older than you are." "Ten years in wisdom, and fifty in goodness, but I scarcely fancy that more than six months separate our birthdays. Now, I know I am not expressing myself very nicely, but, you see, we can't all be eloquent, and perhaps it should count for a little when I tell you that I never made an attempt of the kind before. I am, however, most painfully anxious to convince you." Miss Schuyler recognized it, and liked him the more for the diffidence which he wrapped in hasty speech. "Then," she said softly, "if in six months from now----" Breckenridge swayed in his saddle; but the girl's heel was quicker, and as her horse plunged the hand he would have laid on her bridle fell to his side. "No!" she said. "If in six months you are still in the same mind, you can come to Hastings-on-the-Hudson, and speak to me again. Then, you may find me disposed to listen; but we will go on to Fremont in the meanwhile." Breckenridge's response was unpremeditated, but the half-broken horse, provoked by his sudden movement, rose with fore hoofs in the air, and then whirled round in a circle. Its rider laughed exultantly, swaying lithely, with the big hat still in one hand that disdained the bridle; but his face grew grave when there was quietness again, and he turned towards the girl. "I shall be in the same mind," he said, "for ever and ever." They rode on to Fremont, and the next day Breckenridge drove Miss Schuyler, who was going back to New York, the first stage of her journey to the depot. A month had passed when one evening Torrance rode that way. The prairie, lying still and silent with a flush of saffron upon its western rim, was tinged with softest green, but broad across the foreground stretched the broken, chocolate-tinted clods of the ploughing, and the man's face grew grimmer as he glanced at them. He turned and watched the long lines of crawling cattle that stretched half-way across the vast sweep of green; and Larry and his wife, who stood waiting him outside the homestead, understood his feelings. Raw soil, rent by the harrows and seamed by the seeder, and creeping bands of stock, were tokens of the downfall of the old regime. Then Torrance, drawing bridle, sat still in his saddle while Hetty and her husband stood by his stirrup.