Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no doubt, where many worshipers were met together. The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals. But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver, truer worship from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody down the wide spaces of the Grass River Valley. CHAPTER VII THE LAST BRIDGE BURNED ...Scores of better men had died. I could reach the township living, but--He knew what terrors tore me-- But I didn't! But I didn't! I went down the other side. --The Explorer. Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs left by the grasshoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to plan a picnic dinner for the coming Saturday. Jim Shirley hummed an old love tune as he helped Pryor Gaines to close the windows and door for the week. Only little Todd Stewart, with sober face, scratched thoughtfully at the hard earth with his hard little toes. "Can't there be no more little children where there's grasshoppers and Darley Champerses?" he asked his mother. "Yes, yes, Todd. You won't be lonesome long," his mother assured him. "Some time when you are a man you can say, 'I was the only little boy the grasshoppers and Darley Champers didn't get.' You stout little Trojan!" And then Todd, too, caught the spirit of the day and went singing blithely away. Across the bare hollow of Grass River, and beyond the sand dunes into the brown wastes that had been grassy prairies, his young voice came trailing back still singing, as he rode behind his father, following the long hot trail toward their home. And the other settlers went their ways, each with courage renewed, for the new week's work.