Before two years had passed, wild blackberry vines had covered the grave
with a thick mat of tangled leaves, green in summer, blood-red in the
autumn. And before three more had passed there was no one in the place
who knew the secret of the grave. Farmer Weitbreck and his wife were
both dead, and the estate had passed into the hands of strangers who had
heard the story of Wilhelm, and knew that his body was buried somewhere
on the farm; but in which field they neither asked nor cared, and there
was no mourner to tell the story. John Weitbreck had realized his dream
of going West, a free man at last, and by no means a poor one; he looked
out over scores of broad fields of his own, one of the most fertile of
the Oregon valleys.

Alf was with him, and Carlen; and Carlen was Alf's wife,--placid,
contented wife, and fond and happy mother,--so small ripples did there
remain from the tempestuous waves beneath which Carl Lepmann's life had
gone down. Some deftly carved boxes and figures of chamois and their
hunters stood on Carlen's best-room mantel, much admired by her
neighbors, and longed for by her toddling girl,--these, and a bunch of
dried and crumbling blossoms of the Ladies' Tress, were all that had
survived the storm. The dried flowers were in the largest of the boxes.
They lay there side by side with a bit of carved abalone shell Alf had
got from a Nez Perce Indian, and some curious seaweeds he had picked up
at the mouth of the Columbia River. Carlen's one gilt brooch was kept in
the same box, and when she took it out of a Sunday, the sight of the
withered flowers always reminded her of Wilhelm. She could not have told
why she kept them; it certainly was not because they woke in her breast
any thoughts which Alf might not have read without being disquieted. She
sometimes sighed, as she saw them, "Poor Wilhelm!" That was all.

But there came one day a letter to John that awoke even in Carlen's