* * * * *

Here was grown the most bounteous, the richest and finest wheat in all
the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man,
the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917,
should come from a vast, treeless, waterless, dreary desert!

This wonderful place was an immense valley of considerable altitude
called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on the
west, the Coeur d'Alene and Bitter Root Mountains on the east, the
Okanozan range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south. The
valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past.
The rainfall was slight except in the foot-hills of the mountains. The
Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered on
three sides what was known as the Bend country. South of this vast area,
across the range, began the fertile, many-watered region that extended
on down into verdant Oregon. Among the desert hills of this Bend
country, near the center of the Basin, where the best wheat was raised,
lay widely separated little towns, the names of which gave evidence of
the mixed population. It was, of course, an exceedingly prosperous
country, a fact manifest in the substantial little towns, if not in the
crude and unpretentious homes of the farmers. The acreage of farms ran
from a section, six hundred and forty acres, up into the thousands.

* * * * *

Upon a morning in early July, exactly three months after the United
States had declared war upon Germany, a sturdy young farmer strode with
darkly troubled face from the presence of his father. At the end of a
stormy scene he had promised his father that he would abandon his desire