John and Eloise Deal, with Wentworth and Laura and Millard, came for Abbie in the big sedan. Abbie had on her black silk with white collar and cuffs, and a new hat with a noble-appearing pom-pon on one side, which the milliner had told her looked “chic.” Above Abbie’s old wrinkled face it looked as chic as a painted one would have looked atop the portrait of Whistler’s mother.

She had the quilt done up in a big flat package, and she put her feet on it in the car, as though it might, from sheer naturalness of the roses, ramble out of the sedan window. The pearls in the little box she held tightly in the bag in her hands.

The big car shot out over the graveled roads. Wentworth was at the wheel. Abbie wished John would do the driving. As a matter of fact Wentworth, born to the wheel, with all the younger generation, was the more alert driver, but Abbie could not think so.

“You know, Wentworth, I wish you wouldn’t go so fast. Can’t we go a little slower and see the country better?”

“You’re sort of cracked about the country, aren’t you, Grandma?”

“Yes, I guess I am, Wentworth. But if you’d gone over these same roads in a covered wagon, when there wasn’t even a trail in the grass, you’d be, too.”

At the top of a hill, John said something to his son, and the big car slowed down and stopped. “Take a drink, Mother,” John waved his hand to the panorama before them, “but don’t get intoxicated.”

In the distance the Platte sprawled out lazily in the morning sun, the thick foliage of its tree-borders green against the sky’s summer blue. There were acres of yellow wheat stubble where once the buffalo had wallowed, fields of young corn where once the prairie grass had grown, great comfortable homes and barns where once the soddies had stood. There were orchards and pastures and cattle, and a town nestling under the sheltering shade of huge trees. And soft white languorous clouds slipped into the east.

As they looked, there was a humming sound, and like one of the dragon-flies from the old creek bed, an aeroplane came out of the southwest. As direct and as fast as the southwest winds, it shot toward Omaha, back over the road that the Deals’ and Lutzes’ and the Reinmuellers’ plodding oxen had come. From the hilltop near the Platte, Abbie Deal watched the mail plane go back over the road that the plodding oxen had come.

They slipped into Omaha at ten o’clock,—the Omaha that had been the raw frontier town, but was now a city of nearly a quarter million.

Mack, at home from the bank, came out to meet them when they turned into the driveway. The Mackenzie Deal place, a huge brick structure, with its clipped lawn and its sunken garden and its lily pools, was lovely in the morning sunlight. And it belonged to a man who had lived in a soddie until his thirteenth year, and to a woman whose first home on the prairie was hung with burlap to keep out the cold.