Down in the oak-grove, Joe Thomson stood leaning against a low bough, staring out at the river valley, with the shimmering glow of the twilight sky above it. At the soft whirring sound of an automobile he turned, to see a gray runabout coasting down the long slope from the three cottonwoods. "Jerry!" The glad cry broke from his lips involuntarily. Jerry did not speak. After the first instant of assurance that Joe was alive, her eyes were not on the young ranchman, but on the landscape beyond him. There, billow on billow of waving young wheat breaking against the oak-wood outpost swept in from far away, where once she had looked out on nothing but burning, restless sand, spiked here and there by a struggling green shrub. "What has done all this?" she cried, at last. "I'm partly 'what,'" Joe Thomson replied. The shadows were on his face again, and his loss, after that moment of glad surprise, seemed to be doubly heavy. "But how? I don't understand. I'm dreaming. You really are here, and not dead, are you?" "No, you are not dreaming. I only wish you were," Joe responded, gloomily. "But no matter. Yes, I'm here. 'Part of me lived, but most of me died,'" he muttered Kipling's line half audibly. "I subleased your land from the Macpherson Mortgage Company three years ago. The lease expires to-day. You remember what it was worth when you saw it before. I shall hand it over to you now, worth thirty dollars an acre. Thirty thousand dollars, at the very least, besides the value of the crop. I got beyond the blowout and followed it up. I plowed and planted. Lord! how I plowed and planted! And as with old Paul and Apollos, it was God who gave the increase." "Joe! Oh, Joe! You are a miracle-worker!" Jerry cried. "A worker, all right, maybe. And all life is a miracle," Joe declared, gravely. "But your own land, Joe. They told me that your house was gone and that maybe you had gone with it, and that these roads down here were impassable and nobody could find you." Joe came to the side of the little gray car where Jerry sat with her white hands crossed on the steering-wheel. Her soft white gown, fitted for a summer afternoon on the Macpherson porch, seemed far more lovely in the evening light down by the oak-trees. Her golden hair was blown in little ringlets about her forehead, and her dark-blue eyes--Joe wondered if Nature ever gave such eyes to another human being!