"Wal, she ain't far away but we can look out for her. She ain't poor n'r fatherless as long as we live, hey?"

And then silence fell on them. As they were jogging homeward they saw the gray gulls rise from the sod and go home to the lake for the night.

They heard the crickets' evening chorus broaden and deepen to an endless and monotonous symphony, while behind fantastic, thin, and rainless clouds the sun sank in unspeakable glory of colour. The air, perfectly still, was cool almost to frostiness, and, far above, the fair stars broke from the lilac and gold of the sun-flushed sky. Lights in the farm-houses began to appear.

Once or twice Anson said: "She's about at Summit now. I hope she's chirked up."

They met threshing-crews going noisily home to supper. Once they met an "outfit," engine, tank, separator, all moving along like a train of cars, while every few minutes the red light from the furnace gleamed on the man who was stuffing the straw into the furnace-door, bringing out his face so plainly that they knew him. As the night grew deeper, an occasional owl flapped across the fields in search of mice.

"We're bound to miss her like thunder, Bert; no two ways about that.

Can't help but miss her on the cookin', hey?"

Bert nodded without looking up. As they came in sight of home at last, and saw the house silhouetted against the faintly yellow sky, Ans said with a sigh:

"No light an' no singin' there to-night."

CHAPTER IX.

"BACHING" IT AGAIN.

"The fact is, Flaxen has sp'iled us," laughed Anson, a couple of days later, when Bert was cursing the soggy biscuit. "We've got so high-toned that we can't stand common cookin'. Time was we'd 'a'

thought ourselves lucky to git as good as that. Rec'lect them flapjacks we ust to make? By mighty! you could shoe a horse with 'em. Say, I wish I could jest slip in an' see what she's a-doin' about now, hey?"

"She's probably writin' a letter. She won't do much of anythin' else for the first week."

"I hope you're right," said Anson.

They got a queer little letter every Wednesday, each one for several weeks pitifully like the others.

Dear boys i thought i would take my pen in hand to tell you i dont like it one bit the school is just as mene as it can be the girls do laugh at me they call me toe-head. if i catch em right i will fix their heads. They is one girl who i like she is from pipestone she dont know no moren i do she says my dress is pritty--ol nig an the drake all rite i wish i was home. ELGA.

The wish to be home was in all these letters like a sob. The men read them over carefully and gravely, and finally Anson would put them away in the Bible (bought on Flaxen's account) for safe-keeping.

As the letters improved in form their exultation increased.

"Say, Bert, don't you notice she writes better now? She makes big I's now in place o' little ones. Seems 's if she runs the sentence all together, though."

"She'll come out all right. You see, she goes into the preparatory department, where they teach writin' an' spellin'. You'll see her hand improve right along now."

And it did, and she ceased to wail for home and ceased to say that she hated her studies.

"I am getting along splendid," she wrote some weeks after this. "I like my teacher; her name is Holt. She is just as nice as she can be. She is cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go to soshibles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant. I am feeling pretty good, but I wish you boys was here."

She did not wish to be at home this time!

Winter shut down on the broad land again with that implacable, remorseless brilliancy of fierce cold which characterises the northern plain, stopping work on the farm and bolting all doors. Hardly a day that the sun did not shine; but the light was hard, white, glittering, and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless. There was now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation almost as terrible as that of a ship wedged amid the ice-floes of the polar regions.

Day after day rising to feed the cattle, night after night bending over the sooty stove listening to the ceaseless voice of the wind as it beat and brushed, whispered, moaned, and piped or screamed around the windows and eaves--this was their life, varied with an occasional visit to the store or the post-office, or by the call of a neighbour. It is easy to conceive that Flaxen's bright letters were like bursts of bird-song in their loneliness. Many of the young men, their neighbours, went back East to spend the winter--back to Michigan, Iowa, New York, or elsewhere.

"Ans, why don't you go back an' visit your folks?" asked Bert, one day.

"I'll take care o' things."

"Wal, the fact is, I've be'n away so long they don't care whether I'm alive er dead. I ain't got no near relatives except a sister, an' she's got all the fam'ly she can 'tend to."

"Same here. We ain't very affectionate, anyway; our fam'ly and I don't write. Still I'd like to go back, just to see how they all are."

"Why not go?"

"Well, I don't know. I guess I must one o' these days. I've kind o'

be'n waitin' till we got into a little better shape. I hate to go back poor."

"So do I. It's hard work f'r me to give up beat; I ain't goin' to do it yet awhile."

Sometimes a neighbour dropped in during the middle of the day, and on pleasant days they would harness up the team and take a drive down to the store and the post-office; but mainly they vegetated like a couple of huge potatoes in a cellar, as did most of the settlers. There was nothing else to do.

It was the worst winter since the first that they had spent in the country. The snow seemed never still. It slid, streamed, rose in the air ceaselessly; it covered the hay, drifted up the barn door, swept the fields bare, and, carrying the dirt of the ploughed fields with it, built huge black drifts wherever there was a wind-break, corn-field, or other obstruction.

There were moments when Bert was well-nigh desperate. Only contact with hard work and cold winds saved him. He was naturally a more ambitious, more austere man than Anson. He was not content to vegetate, but longed to escape. He felt that he was wasting his life.

It was in December that the letter first came from Flaxen which mentioned Will Kendall.

O boys! I had the best time. We had a party at our house and lots of boys came and girls too, and they were nice, the boys, I mean.

Will Kendall he is the nicest feller you ever seen. He has got black eyes and brown hair and a gold watch-chain with a locket with some girl's hair in it, and he said it was his sister's hair, but I told him I didn't believe it, do you? We had cake and popcorn and la.s.ses candy; and Will he took me out to supper.

Bert was reading the letter, and at this point he stopped and raised his eyes, and the two men gazed at each other without a word for a long time. Then Anson laughed.

"She's gittin' over her homesickness. She's all right now she's got out to a sociable."

After that there was hardly a letter that did not mention Kendall in some innocent fashion among the other boys and girls who took part in the sleigh-rides, parties, and sociables. But the morbidly acute Bert, if he saw, said nothing, and Anson did not see.

"Who d' y' s'pose this Kendall is?" asked Anson, one night late in the winter, of Gearheart, who was reading the paper while his companion reread a letter from Flaxen. "Seems to me she's writin' a good 'eal about him lately."

"Oh, some slick little dry-goods clerk or druggist," said Bert, with unwarrantable irritation.

"She seems to have a good 'eal to say about him, anyway," repeated Anson, in a meditative way.

"Oh, that's natural enough. They are two young folks together," replied Bert, with a careless accent, to remove any suspicion which his hasty utterance might have raised in Anson's mind.

"Wal, I guess you're right," agreed Anson, after a pause, relieved.

This relief was made complete when in other letters which came she said less and less about Kendall. If they had been more experienced, they would have been disturbed by this suspicious fact.

Then again, when Anson wrote asking "What has become of that Kendall you wrote so much about?" she replied that he was there, and began writing of him again in a careless sort of way, with the craft of woman already manifest in the change of front.

Spring came again, and that ever-recurring miracle, the good green gra.s.s, sprang forth from its covering of ice and snow, up from its hiding-place in the dark, cold sod.

Again the two men set to work ferociously at the seeding. Up early in the wide, sweet dawn, toiling through the day behind harrow and seeder, coming in at noon to a poor and badly cooked meal, hurrying back to the field and working till night, coming in at sundown so tired that one leg could hardly be dragged by the other--this was their daily life.