She bent over her boy, and pushing back the hair from his forehead, she kissed it reverently, nor dreamed in how many a bitter strife would the memory of this sacred hour come back to him, with the blessed note of victory. The next morning Asher put on his working clothes and began the life of a hired man on his father's farm. The summer was long and hot, and in the late August the dread typhoid malaria swept up from the woods marshes. It was of virulent form and soon had its way with Asher's father and mother. When the will of Francis Aydelot was read in court, the inexorable will of a stubborn man, it declared that the Cloverdale Hotel, the bank stock, and the farm with all the appurtenances thereunto pertaining, should descend to Asher Aydelot, provided he should remain a resident of Ohio and should never be united in marriage to any descendant of Jerome Thaine of the State of Virginia. Failing in this, all the property, except a few hundred dollars in cash, should descend to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, and her heirs and assigns forever; provided these heirs were not the children of Virginia Thaine of the state of Virginia. On the same day, Asher wrote to one Jane Aydelot, of Philadelphia, to come to Ohio and take possession of her property. Then he carefully sodded the two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fashioned sweet pinks upon them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face hopefully to the West. CHAPTER II THE SIGN OF THE SUNFLOWER Little they knew what wealth untold Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled: Who would have dared, with brush or pen, As this land is now, to paint it then? --Allerton. The trail had left the woodland far to the eastward, and wound its way over broad prairie billows, past bluffy-banked streams, along crests of low watersheds, until at last it slid down into an open endlessness of the Lord's earth--just a vasty bigness of landstuff seemingly left over when geography-making was done. It was untamed stuff, too, whereon one man's marking was like to the track of foam in the wake of one ship in mid-ocean. Upon its face lay the trail, broad and barren of growth as the dusty old National pike road making its way across uplands and valleys of Ohio. But this was the only likeness. The pike was a gravel-built, upgraded highway, bordered by little rail-fenced fields and deep forests hiding malarial marshes in the lower places. This trail, flat along the ungraded ground, tended in the direction of least resistance, generally toward the southwest. It was bounded by absence of landmarks, boulder or tree or cliff. Along either side of it was a fringe of spindling sunflower stalks, with their blooms of gold marking two gleaming threads across the plains far toward the misty nothingness of the western horizon.