college at Lawrence for three winters, coming home to spend Saturdays and Sundays grafting and budding little seedling trees in Schoonover's sand-floored dugouts.
Bill had grafted trees enough to qualify him for a Bachelor of Grafters' degree; he had pulled trees enough out of the long rows, following the curved plow that ran under them and cut the deep roots, to plant a border around the state of Kansas.
His big hands were ridged with callouses from this uplifting work; the muscles of his long back were as hard as dried beef. Yet Bill was a timid man. He had clung to this job in the nursery so long that people who had looked upon him confidently when he began to attend business college shook their heads doubtfully and said Bill Dunham was a long time starting out; that they didn't reckon he ever would start out, just stick to that job till he took root in a row and one of the hands pulled him up and shipped him off for a tree.
It was a sort of traditional requirement of a young man in that part of Kansas, where people had a good many New England ideas about them still, that he must start out when he reached the age of twenty-one. Even if he didn't go very far he ought to start out. He ought to get married, rent a farm, begin to raise corn and hogs and voters to maintain the glorious traditions of the state. Bill Dunham had passed that broad chalk-mark in his years, long since, and he had not moved a foot on the prescribed career.
Bill was overeducated, they said; that was the
