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 to enlist in the army.
Kurt Dorn walked away from the gray old clapboard house, out to the fence, where he leaned on the gate.