"Never gentler." Joe's face was triumphant and his dark eyes were shining with hope. "This rainy season and the good old steam-plows are doing their perfect work. You haven't had any sand-storms lately, maybe you have noticed. Well, wheat is growing green and strong over more than half of that land now. There's not so much sand to spare as there used to be." "You don't mean it!" York exclaimed, incredulously. "Go and look at it yourself, you doubting old Missourian who must be shown," Joe retorted. "There's a stretch on the northeast toward the bend in the Sage Brush that is low and baked hard after the rains, and shifty and infernally stubborn in the dry weather." York meditated awhile, combing his heavy hair with his fingers. "The river runs by your place?" he asked, at length. "Yes, my house is right at the bend, and there is no sand across the Sage Brush," Joe replied. "Well, the blowout will never stop till it gets up to the south bank of the bend. As I've told you already, you'll have to take the Lord Almighty into partnership to work a miracle. Otherwise this creeping up from behind and beyond the thing will be a never-ending job of time and money and labor. You'll never catch up with it. It's just too everlastingly big, that's all. You'll be gray-bearded, and bald-headed, and deaf, and dim-sighted before you are through." "I will not," Joe declared, doggedly. "And I've already told you that I've always taken the Lord Almighty into partnership, or I'd have been a derelict on a sea of sand lang syne." "Joe, your faith in the Lord and faith in the prairies might move mountains, but they haven't yet moved the desert." "Not entirely," Joe replied, "but if I do my part, who knows what Providence may do?" As he sat there in the hope and strength of his youth, something in Joe Thomson's expectant face brought a pang to the man beside him. "Joe, your lease will soon expire. I said to you three years ago that women are shiftier than blowouts. You didn't believe me, but it's the truth." "Naturally the Macpherson Mortgage Company must acquire much knowledge of such things in the development of their business," Joe responded, jokingly. "Little Thelma Ekblad on the claim above mine has helped to pay off the mortgage your company held, and sent herself to the university, working in the harvest-fields and at the hay-baler to do it. Thelma never seemed shifty to me. She's a solid little rock of a woman who never flinches." "I'll except Thelma. You ought--" But York went no further, for he knew Joe's spirit would not respond to his thought, and he had no business to be thinking, anyhow. He had known Joe Thomson from childhood. He admired Jerry Swaim greatly for what she had been doing, but he knew much of the Philadelphia end of the game, and his heart ached for the young Westerner, who, he believed, had shouldered a stupendous, tragical burden for the sake of a heart-longing only a strong nature like Joe's could know.