"Two hundred dollars. I want to borrow fourteen hundred more and get it clear away from Darley Champers. I'm sure with a ranch again, Uncle Jim will be able to win out," Leigh insisted. "What's on it now?" Thaine asked. "Just weeds and a million sunflowers. Enough to send Prince Quippi such a message he'd have to write back a real love letter to me," Leigh replied. "Leighlie, you can't do it. You might pay interest maybe, year in and year out, the gnawing, wearing interest. That's all you'd do even with your hens and butter. Don't undertake the burden." "I've already done it," Leigh declared. "Throw it up. You can't make it," Thaine urged. "I know I can," Leigh maintained stoutly. "You can't." "I can." "How?" Thaine queried hopelessly. "If I can get the loan--" "Which you can't," Thaine broke in. "Any man on Grass River will tell you the same, if you don't want to believe the word of a nineteen-year-old boy." "Thaine, I must do something. Even our home is mortgaged. Everything is slipping out from under us. You don't know what that means." "My father and mother knew it over and over." Thaine's face was full of sympathy. "And they won out. I'm not so foolish after all. When they came out here, they took the prairies as Nature had left them, grass-covered and waiting. I'm taking them as the boom left them, weed-covered and waiting. I'll earn the interest myself and make the land pay the principal and I know exactly how it will do it, too." "Tell me how," Thaine demanded. "It's no dream. I got the idea out of a Coburn book last winter," Leigh replied. "You mean the State Agricultural Report of Secretary Coburn? Funny place to hunt for inspiration; queer gospel, I'd say," Thaine declared. "Why didn't you go to the census report of 1890, or Radway's Ready Relief Almanac, or the Unabridged Dictionary?" "All right, you despiser of small things. It was just an agricultural report full of tables and statistics and comparative values and things that I happened on one day when things were looking blackest, and right in the middle I found a page that Foster Dwight Coburn must have put in just for me, I guess. There was a little sketch of an alfalfa plant with its long good roots, and just one paragraph beside it with the title, 'The Silent Subsoiler.'" "That sounds well," Thaine observed. He was listening eagerly in spite of his joking, and his mind was alert to the girl's project. "Mr. Coburn said," Leigh went on, "that there are some silent subsoilers that do their work with ease and as effectually as any plow ever hitched, and the great one of these is alfalfa; that it is a reservoir of wealth that takes away the fear of protest and over-draft." "Well, and what if Coburn is right?" Thaine queried.