Asher's eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds' songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest. "Yes, I'm still among the middle-aged," he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. "But I don't know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There's still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. I'll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I'll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life?" At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey's letter, and the subject shifted to the problems of the far East. "We aren't the only people who are having trouble," Asher said. "I read in the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance." "What's them Boxers wantin'? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?" Darley Champers asked. "Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look like a football game. I hope Pryor will not be in their line of march." "Pryor Gaines'd better stayed right here. It's what's likely to happen to a man who goes missionarying too far, and we could 'a used him here." It was an unusual concession for Darley Champers to make regarding the church, and Asher looked keenly at him. "Say, Aydelot," Champers said suddenly, "you have more influence with John Jacobs 'n anybody else, I know. If you see the Jew, pass it on to him that Wyker's at his old cut-ups again over in Wykerton, and he's danged bitter against Jacobs. I can help him on the side like I did before, but the Jew's got hold of enough over there now to run things, with ownin' land all round and holdin' mortgages on town property just to keep joints out of 'em. I do no end of business for Jacobs now. Never had dealin's with a straighter man. But he'd better look out for Wyker. The Dutchman's insides is all green with poison, he's hated Jacobs so many years."