The design was wrought in stalwart, bending backs-the dull-blue, faded calico backs of his wife and daughters, the bright-blue overall backs of his grown sons, the small, rounded, brown backs of the younger children, and his own broad, red-sweatered back, vividly crossed with new, white suspenders.

A freeze might come at any time, and the beets must be dug while the ground was still soft. As he held in his horses for Justina to get down, Kowalewski could see that the last of the crop would

be on its way to the factory within the week. Peter Knodel was forehanded and industrious. It was a good family to be marrying into.

Justina took her place in the rows. Her back made another spot of blue in the fields.

"Goot luck, Konrad!" shouted Peter Knodel. He straightened his stout form with difficulty and waved his hand. The other Knodels waved and shouted, too, and Kowalewski drove on with a warmth at his heart.

He remembered his first journey along that way five years before, an alien, with no English and no friends, poor, alone, and afraid. He had walked over there on the right, close to Peter Knodel's fence. There had been only one faint road across the prairie then; now there were four, side by side, their ruts worn deep by GermanRussian wheels, too deep for comfortable traffic, so that Kowalewski, the Knodels, and the rest were beginning for themselves a fifth, wherein the feet of his big Percherons moved ponderously while he thought of the changes in his fortunes.

His land, his wife, his citizenship! He was on his way that day to grasp them all at last. And though his heart pounded from nervousness, he wished the naturalization hearing had fallen in some lessbusy season, so that Justina, and maybe her father and mother, too, could have gone to court with him to hear him answer the questions, so sure was he-sure even while he was afraid. That was Kowalewski.

When evening came his citizen paper would be safely in the bank, the land. office would have a copy of it, he would have bought and put on in Simon Raabe's store elk-hide shoes, a sheepskin coat,-he fingered the holes in the one he wore,and a blue-flannel shirt, and he would be eating supper in Peter Knodel's house, while his horses had their fill of oats and hay in Peter Knodel's barn.

The Percherons went at a heavy trot. The thud of it beat out for him in painful, halting cadence: "The Constitution of the United States-is the fundamental law by which-the country is governed

. . The three branches of the Government are" It came hard, that kind of thing. He took his mind in both his hands and wrenched out the words, "the legislative the executive-and the judicial." That was the worst of all. "An anarchist is one who disbelieves-in organized government. I am not—an anarchist." Much that his lips said had no more meaning for his mind than the words of an incantation.

questions to get a thing that was worth money. But it was the law. When they told you something was the law, it always ended talk, and you did what they said.

He tried to remember to what he had pledged himself in his "Declaration of Intention," his first citizen paper, made two years before. The words eluded him, but hung somewhere in his mind like a forgotten tune: "It is bona fide my intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, of whom I am now a subject. . . I am not an anarchist; I am not a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy; and it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein. So help me God."

He drove into town thinking about it all, and hitched his horses to the rail in front of the court-house. More teams were tied in the public square than he had ever seen there. Every one knew the reason: one night a few months before the red reflection of the Great War had spread itself faintly throughout the peaceful, empty stretches of the county, and with it had gone the rumor that those of foreign birth who were still unnaturalized could be taken back by force to fight for the princes, potentates, states, and sovereignties to which they had failed to forswear allegiance.

They did not want to go. German, Russian, English, Swede, Norwegian, Pole, or what you will, un-American, perhaps, in this or that, or everything, they were bound together strongly by one bond, the land. The aliens of the county were tied to its soil like the cottonwoods that flanked the irrigating-ditches. Their roots went down as deep. They had come, landless and homeless, to a place where into the hands of each of them had been given a part of the country, to have and to hold forever, to homestead and inhabit. They wanted to stay.

So when Kowalewski went into the

earth gathered there, waiting to be made citizens of the United States and secure in their tenure of the land.

The German-Russians predominated, tall men, most of them, big-boned, and heavy. From his place by the door Konrad Kowalewski's glance went easily above the heads of them all. He nodded to his friend Andyjewski, who was one of the witnesses on his petition for naturalization, and went over to a place beside him, where he stood. All the seats were filled. As it waited patiently, this gathering of dry-landers, it might have seemed the flotsam upon the curling wave of society, the strays that American civilization had forced out there ahead of itself where no one else would go; the men who held, as it were, the economic firing-line.

The county seat to which they had come was a town of wide streets and charming houses, and there was learning there, with prosperity and comfort. But these men with the seamed and anxious faces were all from the dry-land country, where life steps to a different measure. There was not one of them whose hands and feet and limbs and skin and countenance and hair and clothes did not prove it. They were blazing the way, laying the deep foundations, beginning the conquest of the wilderness, and the wilderness was exacting heavy toll for what they won. At one time or another they had all got caught in the cogs of things and been chewed somewhere.

As the hearing went on, Kowalewski saw that the judge and the government man were kind. They did not wish to close the doors upon any one; but the questions they asked were not an empty form. The young and the sound must answer them, homestead or no homestead, or go away unnaturalized, to return, if they wished, at the next hearing to try again.

It was hard to get up before that crowd of people, with all you had in the balance, and say out loud the things you had learned alone on the empty plains, the bailiff at your elbow to prod you if you did n't do right. Kowalewski's throat

contracted and closed as he waited, and the sweat broke out on his big body.

But he knew it, he knew it, he knew it! All the judges and government men and bailiffs in the world could n't scare it out of him. He cleared his throat so loudly that people looked at him; he stiffened his muscles and stood straight.

The government man was asking Joe Guliani, a bright-eyed young Italian who worked for the railroad, if he was a polygamist.

"Who? Me?" said Joe, in staccato surprise. prise. "No; me no p❜lyg'mist. Me

Democrat!"

Kowalewski laughed with the rest, too loudly in his relief at being permitted to make a noise; then he sighed deeply. He wished they'd call his name and get done with it.

Joe Guliani came down the room, showing all his teeth in a friendly, shamefaced grin. His hearing had been continued until he could learn a little. He thought Uncle Sam made all the laws, and said the two houses of Congress were the White House and the Blue House!

"Konrad Cowylooski!" called the clerk. "Witnesses, John Andyjooski and Simon Raabe. Come forward and take your places.”

Kowalewski stepped out clumsily. Holding himself very straight, he walked toward the judge with heavy, confident steps that beat out for him: "The Constitution-is-the fundamental law-by which-the country is governed."

His witnesses walked after him. He was n't afraid now, and his head was clear.

He came out of the court house staring dully ahead. Mechanically he buttoned. his jacket and turned up the collar. He did not go to Simon Raabe's to buy a new jacket or the elk-hide shoes; there was nothing to take to the bank, nothing to leave at the land office.

He drew himself heavily up over the wheel and turned the horses toward home. The wind blew out of the north. The west was full of storm-clouds. When he

Justina gave a little cry of despair. If he remained an alien, he could not prove up on his homestead; and as his wife she would become an alien, too, and lose the land she had filed on as a desert entry. Her father had spent money on that land. The family depended upon it. They could not let it go.

He stared through the first wandering flakes of the coming storm at a huge tumbleweed journeying solemnly and steadily before the wind. It had the air. of being bound for a far goal without knowledge of Peter Knodel's fence. He watched it until the wires caught it. It would stick there with hundreds of others until some one pulled it loose.

The Knodels came out and urged him to stay for supper.

"No, I must go home," he said. When they asked him what had happened, he said, "Reitler will tell you," and started off through the snow.

Justina came with him to the gate. "Maybe if Father and Sergius Reitler went to Blackrock they could fix it for you?"

But Kowalewski shook his head. There was nothing to do but begin all over again. The government man had told him. The government man could fix it if anybody could.

"It's his business, and I guess he knows."

He looked at her wistfully, hoping for he scarcely knew what.

If this had meant only harder work and longer hours, he would have bent his back to it without comment or hesitation, and she would have helped him. She was almost as old at labor as he, as old at saving. But what would their work and their thrift amount to against the impersonal animosity of the law?

A slow color came into her cheeks beneath his look. Man-limbed, heavy featured, wind-whipped, she stood holding her shawl together, staring silently up at him, her heart-beats in her throat.

Helpless, they looked to each other for help.

One of the Percherons whinnied for

home, the other began to paw; they pulled on the lines.

"Well, I guess I better go."

She stood where he left her, staring after him as he drove off into the night.

He looked back once. He could see nothing but the lighted window, like an opening in the curtain of the dark, and through it the table where Reitler sat with the Knodels at supper. He knew they were talking about him. As he drove on at any gait the horses chose he felt that he had suddenly become an outcast. It could n't be the same for him at Peter Knodel's any more. The door of the only house that had been like home was closing against him. And even his own house would n't be his soon.

It was dark and unfriendly when he reached it. In the blackness around him there was n't a light. Overhead all the stars were gone. A coyote howled. He brushed the back of his hand across his eyes and slid down over the wheel.

The next morning as he sat at breakfast before the sun was up the jingling of the harness on Peter Knodel's big horse made him look up from his plate. An old shepherd dog trotted ahead of the wagon, his nose down.

Peter Knodel tramped past the front door of the soddy in his thick square boots and, rapping at the back, looked in. He did not enter. His body filled the doorway. The world behind him was still

gray.

He liked Konrad Kowalewski, but he knew no way to soften facts. He said what he had come to say. He had telephoned a lawyer. If Justina married Konrad, she could n't prove up on her desert land until Konrad became a citizen. That would take two years. They could n't wait. If they did, some one would file a contest against the land. They needed the land. They could n't get along without it.

He lingered a moment, but as Kowalewski only nodded, he went away; and Konrad sat with his arms stretched along the table and stared at the empty doorway.

His breakfast dishes were on the table,