“What you alwa’s wishin’ for a pianny for when you know you can’t have it?” Grandma wanted to know.

“I might just as well have some fun wishing for it,” she announced pleasantly,—Isabelle was always pleasant,—“when I know it’s as far away as the moon.” And she sat down at the old reed organ and played a windy accompaniment to her thrush-like singing of “Home to Our Mountains.”

Grandma lifted her little wizened face from the clean white pillow. “Come here,” she said suddenly. “Bring me the black bag out o’ my valise, and mind you don’t look in it, either.”

When Isabelle had brought the bag, Grandma took out a smaller pouch, and with Isabelle’s eyes almost starting from her head, counted out fifteen great gold double-eagles.

“There’s your pianny,” Grandma said tartly. “Gold . . . all of ’em . . . and minted in the ’fifties. I’m saving ten of ’em to bury me. You tell your Ma. Tell her when I die . . . I want her to take the money out o’ this bag and buy herself a railroad ticket and go along home with me. I ain’t goin’ to have no mistake made. Like’s not if she wa’n’t along they’d send me on to Chillicothe or Kalamazoo.”

“Oh, Grandma . . .” Isabelle could not yet comprehend the gift of gold that had come from the Aladdin lamp of the little black bag. “How can I thank . . . oh, Grandma . . . I never can thank . . .”

Quite suddenly, Grandma broke into a dry old sobbing. “Don’t thank me . . .” Her voice cracked weirdly. “Thank your dead father. Twas his draft money. I’d never touch it.” Her quavering old voice was torn into hoarse shreds, “Thirty years I kep’ it . . . come in the house ’n’ put it in my lap . . . said, ‘Mother, there’s your money’ . . . blood money . . . I alwa’s said ’twas. . . .”

Isabelle was frightened and ran out for her mother.

When Fritz Reinmueller and John, Oscar and Henry Lutz unloaded the wonderful shining affair at the parlor door, Isabelle would not have exchanged places with the first lady of the land. Grandma greeted the purchase with “What’d you get that color for? Why didn’t you get a plush stool? What’re you settin’ it in that corner for?”

On a morning in July, Grandma’s restless spirit took its grumbling flight, sputtering a little at the Lord for the time spent upon her demise. Abbie took a piece of Will’s gold draft money, and with Grace, accompanied all that was mortal of Grandma back to the old home. “Poor Grandma,” thought Abbie on the train, “I wonder if she’s finding fault with the way the angels’ wings are put on and the direction the River of Life flows.”

It had been twenty-eight years since Abbie had traveled the miles toward the setting sun behind old Red and Baldy. After the services for Grandma, she stayed a week, finding a thousand changes. But the greatest change of all she found in herself. She did not like the old places as well as she had always dreamed. Houses were too thick. Trees were too close and shady. The air was too humid. She felt hemmed in. “I would want to see out more,” she thought to herself, “. . . to far horizons. I belong to the prairie. That’s home now.”